Skip to main content

My Idea of Utopia


I live in a state whose people’s most cherished legend is about a utopia. That legend revolves round Mahabali (whom the people of Kerala call Maveli affectionately). Maveli was an Asura (demon) king. But his reign was the most unparalleled in Kerala, according to the legend. No ruler could ever reach anywhere near the good governance implemented by Maveli.

Maveli’s reign was marked by honesty, equality, justice and other fundamental human values and virtues. There was no discrimination in the name of castes and creeds. No sectarianism. No jingoism. No hate-filled slogans. No gods, too. Probably, this last thing - absence of gods – made it a utopia.

I was brought up in an orthodox Catholic family. As a child I learnt about God and his absurd ways. The Bible opened with the idea of a weird god who created a Paradise (Utopia) for humans only to deceive them sooner than later. God placed an irresistible temptation right in the middle of the Paradise. He knew the human heart wasn’t immune to such temptations. God didn’t want people to live in any Utopia, apparently. Later when people tried to create another Utopia in what came to be known as Babel, the Biblical God again scuttled the project with a ruthlessness that only a God could have possessed.

Gods don’t like Utopias. Maveli was not a god. He was an anti-god, an Asura, a demon. He is far better than gods in Kerala’s legends.

As a young man, I abandoned gods because they failed to appeal to my reason. I found them absolutely absurd. The entire problem of the Paradisiacal Utopia could have been averted simply by making the human nature incapable of evil. In other words, give human beings the simple realization that doing good and avoiding evil is the ideal form of existence. They choose good and shun evil out of that awareness. It is a fundamental choice, choice of good over evil, knowing that it is the ideal choice for the homo sapiens, the wise creatures.

That gives you my notion of a utopia. Utopia, for me, is a place where the human creatures will choose good over evil at any time just because they understand that that is the most reasonable thing to do. Choosing evil is self-destructive. Who doesn’t know that?

Well, most members of our species don’t. That is the answer. Our gods don’t. It was a god who stole Maveli’s utopia.

The gods in the massive Indian pantheon were jealous of Maveli’s utopia. So they sent none less than God Vishnu in the form of a dwarf named Vamana and cheated Maveli like only gods and their beloved bhakts can.

Kerala still celebrates Maveli. The state’s official and longest festival is Onam which celebrates the memory of Maveli. It is this memory that the BJP wanted to steal from Malayalis a few years back when Amit Shah greeted them with Happy Vamana Jayanti on the occasion of Onam. The attempt backfired. Malayalis told Amit Shah to get lost along with his dwarf Vamana.

The charm of Utopia is too strong to resist. Because it is the charm of innocence. Utopia is a land of innocence. Evil doesn’t exist there because people won’t choose evil. Put positively, people choose the good out a profound sense of awareness. That was the kind of place that Maveli’s Kerala was. I wish we could retrieve that Kerala once again.

Exactly a month from now, Kerala will begin its Onam celebrations. I wish Amit Shah won’t impose his dwarf on us. Let us have the demon Maveli. Keep your gods with you.

PS. This post is in response to this week’s #BlogchatterBlogHop prompt: What is your idea of a utopian world?

  

Comments

  1. Yamini MacLeanAugust 3, 2022 at 2:29 PM

    Hari OM
    One of my fondest memories from time at Sandeepany was our Onam celebrations! It is interesting that mankind has built the dream of Utopia for itself in just the same way it 'built' gods and other such as a place of mental escape from its own base nature... it seems we need the beacons for what is 'good' yet constant fall short on ourselves. YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 4, 2022 at 8:41 AM

      Like truth, 'good' also tends to be relative. Even Hitler thought he was doing 'good'. India's right wing today thinks the same. But I know Hitler and all such do-gooders suffer from a kind of evolutionary retardation. I'm sure you know that too.

      Delete
  2. Huma August 9, 2022 at 12:50 AM

    Your notion of utopia is perfect. But, without evil, good would not be appreciated; without temptation, good judgment would not have been appreciated. Everything is relative. Nothing is perfect.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 9, 2022 at 5:17 AM

      Let there be evil and temptations. In my utopia, people choose good in spite of the temptations.

      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
47 comments
Read more

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...
2 comments
Read more

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. ...
16 comments
Read more

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...
18 comments
Read more

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...
16 comments
Read more