Skip to main content

Wear a face to meet the faces


“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken,” Oscar Wilde said with his characteristic wit. It was tough to be Wilde and it got him to the prison in the end. Those were different days. Today Wilde would have been a hero of the LGBTQ+ community.

Is it easy to be yourself even today? Ask Teesta Setalvad and R B Sreekumar. Quite many others are in jail too for the crime of being themselves. Some died there, in the jail. Remember Stan Swamy? Some died without ever getting a trial even. Heard of Gauri Lankesh?

More than half a century ago, Simon and Garfunkel sang about “People talking without speaking / People hearing without listening / People writing songs that voices never share…” “No one dared / Disturb the sound of silence,” they sang. Today no one dares to disturb the sound of sounds. The Great Sound.

We can’t be ourselves today. We wear multiple masks. There is a Covid mask. And there are other masks: of religion, political leaning, of survival itself.

If you question the Great Sound you are likely to end up in prison. Pretend. Wear half a dozen masks. As T S Eliot said, wear “a face to meet the faces that you meet.”

The most active industry in India today is fabrication of masks. Fabrication of history. They even dig up those who were buried hundreds of years ago in order to reshape the skeletons.

What the Supreme Court said in the aftermath of 2002 Gujarat riots and what the same Court says today are the opposite ends of a spectrum. Those whom the Court held in obvious suspicion are the saints today and the petitioners have become the accused.

It’s tough to be yourself in India today.

You can sit in the comfort zone of your home and read the following books. There are a lot more coming soon. New history. New demigods. Great Sounds. 


And resounding media like this!

Some of those who plotted against Modi

PS. Written for Indispire Edition 416: Be yourself, everyone else is already taken. #Authenticity

 

Comments

  1. The Moon's BOYFRIEND July 25, 2022 at 11:14 AM

    The faces they wear, I agree on that. Cause I myself have to wear quite so much to be at different levels, I see people gesturing me to keep them back on while I try to rip it off out of suffocation, the covid masks are less disturbing at those times.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 25, 2022 at 12:04 PM

      Yes, Covid masks are a welcome relief sometimes because it conceals more terrible ones.

      What astounds me is the amount of homework these people do in order to make their horrifying masks so charming.

      Delete
  2. ArtiJuly 25, 2022 at 2:32 PM

    Your posts are so real they hurt. I have nothing to add to what's been said here. My eternal hope for a fairer world keeps me going.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 25, 2022 at 2:52 PM

      I too keep hoping. But a lot of damage is done in the meanwhile, some of it irreparable.

      Delete

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