Skip to main content

The End of the World

Marine Drive in those good old days [Times of India]


I was sitting in the Subash Chandra Bose Park when someone announced the end of the world on a blaring loudspeaker. “Repent and make amends,” the speaker was admonishing. The world was going to end soon, according to him.

He is one of the myriad religious preachers in Kerala who harp on the theme of apocalypse for various motives the dominant of which is money. Religion is one of the easiest means for making money and the end of the world is a powerful theme. No less a person than Jesus predicted the imminent end of the world 2000 years ago. Not only did the world not end, but the evils that Jesus was trying to bring to an end multiplied in geometric progression. Jesus became a god and the world went on with its usual business.

I was thinking of the many apocalyptic predictions like the Mayan calendar and the Halley’s Comet panic when someone stood in front of me calling my name. It was Henry, my classmate at St Albert’s College in the early 1980s. We were now meeting after many years since he was working in another faraway city.

In those days of our college life, Cochin (today’s Kochi) was far more humane in spite of the elephantine mosquitoes that cohabited with humans in a rare symbiotic relationship. The air was eminently breathable despite its heavy salt tang and no preacher of apocalypse would have found it easy to capture the psychedelic fancies of the denizens.

“Remember the Marine Drive of those days?” Henry asked me.

How could I forget? Henry and I used to walk on those golden sands in the evenings enjoying the gentle breeze from the Arabian Ocean. Today the sandbar doesn’t exist. In its place stand high-rise buildings blocking the cold breeze of the sea. The Kochi city stinks today of putrid waste and smothering chemicals.

“The end of the world may be actually close,” Henry said. “What began with a bang will end with a whimper.”

“Perhaps, the end is good. Something better may begin anew,” I said.

Unless the grain of wheat falls in the ground and rots, will there be new life? The apocalypse man was asking.

We sat in silence for a while. Only we were silent. The city is never silent. Apocalypse continued to flow from the loudspeaker drowning the noise of the traffic and the usual bustle of the city.

“You know, Henry,” I said. “There’s one thought that comes to my mind again and again these days.”

“Some perverse thought, I’m sure,” he said with his characteristic laugh. He was always convinced that I was a pervert.

“When I die, that will be the end of the world for me. But the world will carry on as usual. As if nothing has happened. As if I mattered nothing to anyone.”

“Nothing matters. No matter,” Henry said. “That’s what the Buddha called Nirvana. Be happy.” 

 


Comments

  1. Yamini MacLeanFebruary 1, 2023 at 3:27 PM

    Hari OM
    Aye... out brief candle! 'Tis a ponderance that occurs more and more with each passing day. YAM xx

    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
47 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...
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

Are human systems repressive?

Salma I had never heard of Salma until she was sent to the Rajya Sabha as a Member of the Parliament by Tamil Nadu a couple of weeks back and a Malayalam weekly featured her on the cover with an interview. Salma’s story made me think on the nature of certain human systems and organisations including religion. Salma was born Rajathi Samsudeen. Marriage made her Rukiya, because her husband’s family didn’t think of Rajathi as a Muslim name. Salma is the pseudonym she chose as a writer. Salma’s life was always controlled by one system or another. Her religion and its ruthlessly patriarchal conventions determined the crests and troughs of her life’s waves. Her schooling ended the day she chose to watch a movie with a friend, another girl whose education was stopped too. They were in class 9. When Rajathi protested that her cousin, a boy, was also watching the same movie at the same time in the same cinema hall, her mother’s answer was, “He’s a boy; boys can do anything.” Rajathi was...
12 comments
Read more

Roles we Play

When I saw the above picture of Narendra Modi in the latest issue of India Today , what rushed to my mind instantly was a Malayalam film song Veshangal Janmangal … Life is a series of roles dressed up for the occasion. There are different costumes for celebrations and mourning, and there are people who can shed one and move into the other instantly. Are your smiles genuine? Do your tears mean sadness? Or, are they all costumes that suit the occasion? Are you just an actor who plays certain roles? Is the entire cosmos just a gigantic theatre for you? Where can we find the real you beneath all the costumes you keep changing day in and day out? Have you relinquished dharma in favour of cravings? Truth over expediency?  
8 comments
Read more