Skip to main content

My blog and 2023

Blogging with Bobs by the side


2023 holds out new promises as I have decided to bid farewell to teaching at the end of the present academic session. There is a saying in Malayalam which means: When the voice is still good, stop singing. Teaching is something that I have enjoyed doing and my students too found my classes stimulating. Not so any more, I feel. There is a lot of change in the attitudes of the post-Covid generation of students. My understanding is that the smartphones have replaced teachers quite effectively in their horizons. At any rate, there is a time for everything, even to stop your regular job.

That means I will have a lot of time at hand. I look forward to a richer 2023. A lot of reading and writing and some travelling. When the pandemic got the students glued to their smartphones, it got me glued to books more than ever. I found myself reading much more and I loved it too. I would like to write more too.

As a teacher I was more of a learner. That was the chief reason of my success in that profession, I believe. Now, as a writer I will be once again a learner more than anything else. We live in a tough world. More than anything else, fraudulence of all types has become rampant. You find Indians ramming patriotism down your throat from their mansions in Hamilton or Ontario. The media tell far more lies than truths. What you hear is not what the speaker means because words don’t carry meanings any more. They carry emotions and motives.

You never know who is on which side. You may wonder which side you are on. It is a perpetual twilight that baffles you with its nondescript shades. Yeats returns from his tomb: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”

A writer has a lot to learn in such times. I am going to be that learner in 2023. My blog is going to reflect that learning in 2023.

PS. Written for #BlogchatterBlogHop prompt: How do you picture your blogging journey in 2023?

 

Comments

  1. All the best Sir for 2023 and the new innings!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you. There always comes a time for change 😊

      Delete
  2. Hari OM
    Interesting reflection on your immediate future - and I wish you well in it! YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
  3. Covid 19 has been a catalyst in a major paradigm alteration. Everything has changed. From patriotism to education. But there's still something, that only a teacher can bring out. But as the saying goes, all beautiful things must come to an end. Wish you all the best.

    ReplyDelete
  4. All the best for 2023. We wish to read from your blog in the new year.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks, Geethica. I do look forward to a better existence next year.

      Delete
  5. Excellent article Tom. I have kind of stopped both reading and writing. I am just not able to concentrate much these days. But I am hoping I will be able to get back to it soon.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I had begun to wonder what happened to you. Hope the ice is melting. Reach out for any support 👍

      Delete
  6. Same situation 😅 got myself glued to writing and reading more than I can I could have imagined. I still plan to do that. Congratulations on your new journey

    ReplyDelete
  7. This is inspirational. Change is always difficult. Happy to know your are going ahead with what you aspired! My Best wishes!!

    ReplyDelete

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

Ashwatthama is still alive

Fiction Image from Pinterest “I met Ashwatthama.” When Doctor Prabhakar told me this, I thought he was talking figuratively. Metaphors were his weaknesses. “The real virus is in the human heart, Jai,” he had told me when the pandemic named Covid-19 started holding the country hostage. I thought his Ashwatthama was similarly figurative. Ashwatthama was Dronacharya’s son in the Mahabharata. He was blessed with immortality by Shiva. But the blessing became a horrible curse when Krishna punished him for killing the Pandava kids deceptively after Kurukshetra was brought to peace, however fragile that peace was, using all the frauds that a god could possibly use. Krishna of the Kurukshetra was no less a fraud than a run-of-the-mill politician in my imagination. He could get an innocent elephant named Ashwatthama killed and then convert that killing into a blatant lie to demoralise Drona. He could ask Bhima to hit Duryodhana below the belt without feeling any moral qualms in what

Do I Dare?

Alfred Prufrock was sitting in a dimly lit café when a young boy, who was yet to reach adolescence, walked in. The boy looked as inquisitive as Prufrock looked flurried. ‘Hello,’ the boy said. ‘You look so… lonely. And sad too.’ ‘Sad? No, not sad. Just… contemplating. I am, as they say, measuring out my life with coffee spoons.’ ‘Aw! That’s strange. On my planet, I measure things by sunsets. I love sunsets. How can you measure life with something so small as a coffee spoon?’ ‘Did you say “my planet”?’ ‘Well, yes. I come from another planet. I’ve been travelling for quite some time, you know. Went to numerous planets and asteroids and met many strange creatures. Quite a lot of them are cranky.’ The boy laughed gently, almost like an adult. Prufrock looked at the boy with some scepticism and suspicion. He was already having too many worries of his own like whether he should part his hair in the middle and roll up the bottoms of his trousers. ‘They call me Little Prince,’

Live Life Fully

Alexis Zorba, the protagonist of Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel Zorba the Greek , lives life to its fullness. He embraces human experience with his whole heart. He is not interested in rational explanations and intellectual isms. His philosophy, if you can call it that at all, is earthy, spontaneous and passionate. He loves life passionately. He celebrates it. Happiness is a simple affair for him. “I felt once more how simple and frugal a thing happiness is,” he tells us. “A glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea. Nothing else.” You don’t need a lot of things to be happy. Your possessions don’t bring you happiness. All that money you spent on your big house, big car, big everything… It helps to show off. But happiness? No way, happiness doesn’t come that way at all. Zorba loves to play his musical instrument, santouri. He loves to sing. To dance. But don’t get me wrong. He works too. He works hard. There’s no fullness of life without that hard w

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