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
37 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
35 comments
Read more

Zorba’s Wisdom

Zorba is the protagonist of Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel Zorba the Greek . I fell in love with Zorba the very first time I read the novel. That must have been in my late 20s. I read the novel again after many years. And again a few years ago. I loved listening to Zorba play his santuri . I danced with him on the Cretan beaches. I loved the devil inside Zorba. I called that devil Tomichan. Zorba tells us the story of a monk who lived on Mount Athos. Father Lavrentio. This monk believed that a devil named Hodja resided in him making him do all wrong things. Hodja wants to eat meet on Good Friday, Hodja wants to sleep with a woman, Hodja wants to kill the Abbot… The monk put the blame for all his evil thoughts and deeds on Hodja. “I’ve a kind of devil inside me, too, boss, and I call him Zorba!” Zorba says. I met my devil in Zorba. And I learnt to call it Tomichan. I was as passionate as Zorba was. I enjoyed life exuberantly. As much as I was allowed to, at least. The plain truth is
19 comments
Read more

Everything is Politics

Politics begins to contaminate everything like an epidemic when ideology dies. Death of ideology is the most glaring fault line on the rock of present Indian democracy. Before the present regime took charge of the country, political parties were driven by certain underlying ideologies though corruption was on the rise from Indira Gandhi’s time onwards. Mahatma Gandhi’s ideology was rooted in nonviolence. Nothing could shake the Mahatma’s faith in that ideal. Nehru was a staunch secularist who longed to make India a nation of rational people who will reap the abundant benefits proffered by science and technology. Even the violent left parties had the ideal of socialism to guide them. The most heartless political theory of globalisation was driven by the ideology of wealth-creation for all. When there is no ideology whatever, politics of the foulest kind begins to corrode the very soul of the nation. And that is precisely what is happening to present India. Everything is politics
12 comments
Read more

Kochareekal’s dead springs

“These rubber trees have sucked the land dry,” the old woman lamented. Maggie and I were standing on the veranda of her house which exuded an air of wellbeing if not affluence. A younger woman, who must have been the daughter-in-law of the house, had invited us there to have some drinking water. We were at a place called Kochareekal, about 20 km from our home. The distances from Kochi and Kottayam are 40 and 50 kilometres respectively. It is supposed to be a tourist attraction, according to Google Map. There are days when I get up with an impulse to go for a drive. Then I type out ‘tourist places near me’ on Google Map and select one of the places presented. This time I opted for one that’s not too far because the temperature outside was threatening to cross 40 degrees Celsius. Kochareekal Caves was the choice this time. A few caves and a small waterfall. Plenty of trees around to give us shade. Maggie nodded her assent. We had visited Areekal, just 3 km from Kochareekal [Kocha
8 comments
Read more