Skip to main content

Vamana’s Deception


A few years ago, Home Minister Amit Shah infuriated the people of Kerala by wishing them Happy Vamana Jayanti on the occasion of their state festival Onam. While Vamana is the fifth incarnation of God Vishnu for Amit Shah and his counterparts in North India, Vamana is a monstrous impostor for Malayalis. (That’s yet another of the umpteen instances that highlight the impossibility of a monolithic Hindu religion.)

Vamana sent Kerala’s most beloved king, Maveli, to the netherworld merely because of jealousy. Maveli (elision for Maha Bali or Bali the Great) was a demon (asura) king. But he was beloved to his subjects because during his reign Kerala was a utopia. There was fraternity, equality, justice, truthfulness, and so on everywhere in the kingdom. Maveli had become greater than the gods for the people of Kerala. Obviously, gods didn’t like that. So none less than Vishnu took the form of a dwarf, Vamana, and deceived Maveli. That deception was punishment from gods to an asura for being good!

Amit Shah could not have been ignorant of this legend when he greeted Malayalis on Vamana Jayanti. Someone who is an arch-villain for a people was being transmuted into a divine figure with that greeting. Shah and his people are experts at rewriting histories as well as making villains out of heroes and vice versa. But Kerala won’t accept those histories and inversions easily. I wonder whether Shah and his friends have ever tried to find out why their party doesn’t ever win a seat in Kerala’s elections.

Of late, there is some tilt among Kerala’s Hindus towards the BJP. This is achieved by spreading the poison of communal hatred. As I have written in this very space time and again, hatred is a powerful tool, far more powerful than love or any good emotion. Even the people of Kerala can be susceptible to its intoxications. If the nascent sectarianism takes deep roots in the state, that will be a Vamana moment for Amit Shah and his colleagues.

PS. I am participating in #BlogchatterA2Z

Previous Post: Ulysses

Tomorrow: Wiesenthal’s Revenge

 

 


Comments

  1. moondustwriterApril 26, 2022 at 8:30 AM

    To not know the legend or promote anyway - an intentional insult??? Leaders need to respect more.
    U

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 26, 2022 at 9:30 AM

      I'm sure Shah knew what Onam celebrated. He was playing a game as usual.

      Delete
  2. AnonymousApril 26, 2022 at 10:44 AM

    I am just hoping someday, we will be a truly secular country and love will win. It is also ultimately upon us to choose.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 26, 2022 at 11:35 AM

      I would like to share your hope. It's possible but not with the present leadership.

      Delete
  3. Rajeev MoothedathApril 26, 2022 at 10:45 AM

    Must have been testing the waters to see what happens- If it worked good for him and party.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 26, 2022 at 11:20 AM

      That's more likely. In fact, a few BJP people in Kerala went to the extent of defending Shah.

      Delete
  4. Afshan ShaikApril 26, 2022 at 11:15 AM

    That's expected from those who are rewriting history..it almost made me laugh that he wished. So far I have been very happy by seeing how Kerala is handing the political hatred. Now that you say they are falling in their traps...it's painful!!!


    I have written something today which is related to this post. If time permits do read. Little long post though!


    Dropping by from a to z "The Pensive"

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 26, 2022 at 11:22 AM

      Politics is a power game and in that game anything is grist to the mill. Since all other strategies have failed, BJP in Kerala is doing what it did in other states: rouse up communal hatred.

      Delete
  5. AnonymousApril 26, 2022 at 4:18 PM

    Sometimes, you suffer less because others are bad and more because you are very good (just too good to be tolerated by the bad ones). People like Amit Shah will only take the side of the tricksters and present them as role models, not the naïve and the nice ones.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 26, 2022 at 4:23 PM

      The wicked are scared of the innocent. But gods getting scared of others' goodness is quite bizarre.

      Delete
  6. Janaki/Ishaan SaiApril 26, 2022 at 9:58 PM

    Well, this could also be a saazhish (not getting teh exact English word for this at the moment) of Amit Shah ji and his friends, for all you know. These guys can do anything!

    ReplyDelete
  7. Anagha YatinApril 26, 2022 at 11:28 PM

    Mixing politics and religion is a lethal combination. How I wish, as a common man/ woman, that life could be simpler with live and let live policy. Instead of being religious, if we could just be spiritual wont that suffice? The moment all will understand this, no politician would ever be able to milk the cow of religious hatred politics.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 27, 2022 at 10:13 PM

      Spirituality is obsolete today, made so by a man who sat in meditation in a Kedarnath cave for as many seconds as a mushroom in Badrinath longed to be in a Chinese soup.

      Delete
  8. Stock Trading IdeasApril 29, 2022 at 10:35 AM

    BEST STOCK FUTURE TIPS

    for intraday cash calls whats app on 9039000614

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
44 comments
Read more

Florentino’s Many Loves

Florentino Ariza has had 622 serious relationships (combo pack with sex) apart from numerous fleeting liaisons before he is able to embrace the only woman whom he loved with all his heart and soul. And that embrace happens “after a long and troubled love affair” that lasted 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days. Florentino is in his late 70s when he is able to behold, and hold as well, the very body of his beloved Fermina, who is just a few years younger than him. She now stands before him with her wrinkled shoulders, sagged breasts, and flabby skin that is as pale and cold as a frog’s. It is the culmination of a long, very long, wait as far as Florentino is concerned, the end of his passionate quest for his holy grail. “I’ve remained a virgin for you,” he says. All those 622 and more women whose details filled the 25 diaries that he kept writing with meticulous devotion have now vanished into thin air. They mean nothing now that he has reached where he longed to reach all his life. The
62 comments
Read more

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so
39 comments
Read more

Yesterday

With students of Carmel Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving…? It was one of my first days in the eleventh class of Carmel Public School in Kerala, the last school of my teaching career. One girl, whose name was not Margaret, was in the class looking extremely melancholy. I had noticed her for a few days. I didn’t know how to put the matter over to her. I had already told the students that a smiling face was a rule in the English class. Since Margaret didn’t comply, I chose to drag Hopkins in. I replaced the name of Margaret with the girl’s actual name, however, when I quoted the lines. Margaret is a little girl in the Hopkins poem. Looking at autumn’s falling leaves, Margaret is saddened by the fact of life’s inevitable degeneration. The leaves have to turn yellow and eventually fall. And decay. The poet tells her that she has no choice but accept certain inevitabilities of life. Sorrow is our legacy, Margaret , I said to Margaret’s alter ego in my class. Let
36 comments
Read more

Octlantis

I was reading an essay on octopuses when friend John walked in. When he is bored of his usual activities – babysitting and gardening – he would come over. Politics was the favourite concern of our conversations. We discussed politics so earnestly that any observer might think that we were running the world through the politicians quite like the gods running it through their devotees. “Octopuses are quite queer creatures,” I said. The essay I was reading had got all my attention. Moreover, I was getting bored of politics which is irredeemable anyway. “They have too many brains and a lot of hearts.” “That’s queer indeed,” John agreed. “Each arm has a mind of its own. Two-thirds of an octopus’s neurons are found in their arms. The arms can taste, touch, feel and act on their own without any input from the brain.” “They are quite like our politicians,” John observed. Everything is linked to politics in John’s mind. I was impressed with his analogy, however. “Perhaps, you’re r
34 comments
Read more