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
44 comments
Read more

Florentino’s Many Loves

Florentino Ariza has had 622 serious relationships (combo pack with sex) apart from numerous fleeting liaisons before he is able to embrace the only woman whom he loved with all his heart and soul. And that embrace happens “after a long and troubled love affair” that lasted 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days. Florentino is in his late 70s when he is able to behold, and hold as well, the very body of his beloved Fermina, who is just a few years younger than him. She now stands before him with her wrinkled shoulders, sagged breasts, and flabby skin that is as pale and cold as a frog’s. It is the culmination of a long, very long, wait as far as Florentino is concerned, the end of his passionate quest for his holy grail. “I’ve remained a virgin for you,” he says. All those 622 and more women whose details filled the 25 diaries that he kept writing with meticulous devotion have now vanished into thin air. They mean nothing now that he has reached where he longed to reach all his life. The
62 comments
Read more

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so
39 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
36 comments
Read more

Octlantis

I was reading an essay on octopuses when friend John walked in. When he is bored of his usual activities – babysitting and gardening – he would come over. Politics was the favourite concern of our conversations. We discussed politics so earnestly that any observer might think that we were running the world through the politicians quite like the gods running it through their devotees. “Octopuses are quite queer creatures,” I said. The essay I was reading had got all my attention. Moreover, I was getting bored of politics which is irredeemable anyway. “They have too many brains and a lot of hearts.” “That’s queer indeed,” John agreed. “Each arm has a mind of its own. Two-thirds of an octopus’s neurons are found in their arms. The arms can taste, touch, feel and act on their own without any input from the brain.” “They are quite like our politicians,” John observed. Everything is linked to politics in John’s mind. I was impressed with his analogy, however. “Perhaps, you’re r
34 comments
Read more