Skip to main content

For a joyful 2023

 


You and I may be saints in a country that garlands rapists and killers.

One of the delightful short stories of Gabriel Garcia Marquez is ‘The Saint’. A man named Margarito Duarte, who has not studied beyond the primary school, becomes a saint in the view of the narrator by doing nothing but carrying the dead body of his seven-year-old daughter for 22 years hoping to get her canonised by the Catholic Church.

Margarito, like many others of his village, is forced to disinter the body of his daughter because a dam that is going to be constructed requires the acquisition of the parish cemetery. Everyone in the parish disinters the bones of their dear departed so that they can be buried elsewhere. When Margarito opens the tomb of his daughter who had died at the age of 7 due to illness, he is startled. His daughter looked as alive as she was before her burial eleven years ago. He, as well as the others in the parish, is convinced that his daughter is a saint and that is why her body has remained uncorrupted for all these years. Now his quest is to get her canonised.

He takes the body to the Vatican. Popes come and go one by one. 22 years pass. Margarito is still waiting when the narrator meets him, waiting for the canonisation of his daughter. The narrator concludes Margarito’s story saying “he had spent twenty-two years fighting for the legitimate cause of his own canonization.”

Margarito is the real saint, in other words. His is a life that has been dedicated to a single cause with the sincerest commitment. What else is sanctity but that sort of commitment to what you think is your life’s mission?

Absurd, you may say – as I did when I first read this story some ten years ago. What is so holy about a man spending almost an entire lifetime pursuing a foolish cause like Margarito’s? The answer is what I hinted at in the beginning of this post. What is holy, what is heroic, what is patriotic? Who decides such things?

One of the best parables I have ever read about the futility of most human pursuits is from Albert Camus. In his sublime essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus tells us the story of a madman trying to catch fish from a bathtub. Seeing the guy sitting so serenely holding the fishing rod, the psychiatrist asks him, “Hey, chap, caught something yet?” The madman’s answer is: “No, you fool, this is only a bathtub.”

Who is sane and who is mad in this parable?

Camus’s point is that we are not different from that madman. We are trying to catch fish from the bathtub knowing fully well that there is no fish in there. And a few of us are like the psychiatrist pretending to be wise and climbing up holy pedestals. Our endeavours to rescue our idols from among the fossils of Aurangzebs, our dreams about expanding the borders of Akhand Bharat beyond the Himalayas, our notions about heroism and greatness… make us very like Camus’s loony or the loony’s doc. Or like Margarito Duarte. Absurd or hollow pursuits with firm convictions.

If only we could be a little sceptical, the world would be a far better place. What we need is not the saint’s certainty but the fallible person’s scepticism. Don’t be a saint. Take a sip of whisky, sing a song and dance once in a while. Make some mistakes. Enjoy life.

Wish you a joy-filled New Year.

 

Comments

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

Feelings are Snowballs

Illustrations by Copilot Designer Feelings are like snowballs. They make a small start as minor emotions or subtle reactions. Unless they are brought under the control of rational thought, they are likely to intensify as we dwell on them or as new experiences amplify them. It’s just like the snowball picking up more snow on the way and growing bigger. And bigger. That big snowball gathers greater momentum as it hurtles down the hill. Soon it will acquire an unstoppable energy. Quite the same thing happens to feelings. They become powerful enough to control our thoughts and actions. It should be the other way around: our reason should control our emotions. Let us consider an example. Nationalism is a feeling. Contrast it with rational truths. A simple rational truth is 2 + 2 = 4. Indisputable. We all learnt at school that water boils at 100 degrees Celsius. That is another indisputable truth. Unless you’re living on Kilimanjaro where water boils at about 80 degrees Celsius. On the...
13 comments
Read more

The Patriot

Fiction India's new Lady of Justice Raju is shocked out of his deep sleep early in the morning by the doorbell that rings rather imperiously. His mobile phone shows the time: 4.04 am. Who can come visiting at this unearthly hour? Raju looks out through the window and sees a saffron-robed man with a saffron shawl wrapped around his torso standing outside. An alarm bell rings in Raju’s heart. As soon as Raju opens the door, the saffron man hands him a sealed envelope and walks away into the darkness without uttering a single word. The letter is addressed to Mr Rajashekharan, LD Clerk, Shantigram. It is written in extremely formal language. The letter charges Raju of being antinational and orders him to prove his patriotism to concerned authorities at the earliest failing which he will have to face severe consequences under some section of the Naya Nyaya Samhita, New Penal Code. Raju sits with a tremor in his heart on the sofa in his small living room. He doesn’t want to dis...
7 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
15 comments
Read more

A guide to good health

Book Review Title: Weightless: Unburden Author: Dr Mickey Mehta Publisher: Popular Prakashan, Mumbai, 2023 Pages: 240 This is not a book to be read. It is a set of instructions that are to be put into practice if you wish to have long life with good health. Let me tell you at the outset that practising what the author is asking you to is going to be tough, as tough as becoming a genuine yogi. If you want to enjoy some of the simple delights of life like a weekend drink, then you’d better forget this book and go ahead with a wellness programme of your choice. This book can make you a saint. In fact, it intends to do precisely that. In one of the last pages, introducing the author to the readers, the book says that Dr Mickey Mehta’s vision is “Connecting with 8 billion hearts to make wellness the religion no. 1.” Wellness is indeed a religion in Dr Mehta’s vision. The book starts with a theoretical framework which is founded entirely on Indian philosophy, essentially Yoga a...
2 comments
Read more