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 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. 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. 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. 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

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...