Skip to main content

Heart

Kamala Das [From Wikipedia]


Lady, what did you gain by giving up Krishna

And embracing the Prophet’s amorphous Allah?

Did your heart throb better

With your head veiled with the hijab?

The heart works better without the head!

But yours didn’t.

Your head was as good as your heart.

 

You learnt the hard way

That you (nor I, nor anyone)

Can’t run away from yourself

By changing the god.

You betrayed your most beloved god,

The playful Krishna,

In favour of a “rigid husband.”

 

And you remained unhappy

Till the end of your life.

 

Happiness is not given by any god!

Let it be Krishna or Kristu or Allah,

Let it be any god from any culture –

Have you ever come across a happy god anywhere? –

Happiness cannot be given by gods.

Happiness is in your heart:

Or else you won’t ever have it.

 

PS. I’m going to teach a poem of Kamala Das tomorrow. These lines were a result of my reflection on the poet. Kamala Das became Kamala Suraiyya at the age of 65 by changing her religion. And she lost her smile after that. 

An earlier post on Kamala Das: Stains on Greatness 

Top post on Blogchatter

Comments

  1. Hari OM
    "Happiness is in your heart"... yes, this! YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
  2. The 'happiness is in your heart' message has come my way twice this morning. First, via an Insta share and now this post. Perhaps, the universe is nudging me to smile and accept the lethargic state of my writing these days:) Perhaps. Thank you.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The universe has its own ways of telling us certain vital things. All tje best.

      Delete
  3. Your Stories/ poems are refreshing. Keep written. Lots of love 💟

    ReplyDelete
  4. Proud to be your student rrly!Love the way You teach

    ReplyDelete
  5. Sir, can I ask some question?
    According to physics energy can neither be created nor be destroyed so what happens to the human energy after death?,also where does our soul go?what are your views on the concept of souls?
    It's not related to what you have posted yet I'm curious to know all about this. F

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. If you study biology, the answer would be that all organic energy is bum with death. Which branch of science accepts soul? Soul is a good concept for poetry like
      When it rains
      Souls rise like seeds...

      Delete
    2. Everything knowable about the "soul" can be learned by studying the functioning of the brain. In their view, neuroscience is the only branch of scientific study relevant to understanding the soul.-Google.
      I had a teacher who said that after death we all are subjected to judgement and a lot of other things related to what might happen after death. He also said some stuff related to souls.which made me more curious about souls so i decided to read a book on it named destiny of souls. After 2 chapters i stopped reading it though. But still there is this one question which i haven't got a proper answer. What happens after death? Why living if it is to just decay in soil? There must be something more to it. After all humans are considered miracle. Do you think we evolved into this form?Why does humans exist,if existence of humans is dangerous to earth considering the current situations.

      Delete
    3. Glad you're seeking to know the deepest truths. I'm no guru. But i can tell you my convictions.

      Life has the meaning we give to it. I know that death will mark the end of all that I am. But it's my duty to live a 'good' life till death for the sake of promoting goodness on earth. Why? Good is better than bad! Not because I'll receive eternal rewards.

      Read Albert Camus, if you can. The Myth of Sisyphus.

      Delete

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

Two Nuns and two questions

The nuns kept in custody  Two Catholic nuns were arrested on 25 July 2025 at Durg railway station for allegedly trafficking tribal women from Narayanpur in Chhattisgarh to Agra in UP. Today’s newspapers in Kerala have expressed their contempt of the act more vehemently than I had expected. It seems secularism has hope yet in this country. For those who are not aware of the incident, two nuns were arrested because some criminals of a depraved organisation called Bajrang Dal in Chhattisgarh chose to conclude that the nuns were committing the crime of human-trafficking. Since that charge wouldn’t stick, because the women confessed that they were going voluntarily to take up jobs with the help of the nuns in order to raise their families from miserable poverty in a country that claims to be a $5-tillion-economy, another charge was fabricated that the nuns had indulged in religious conversion. Now let us look at certain facts. Though I keep questioning the Christian churches for...

Capital Punishment is not Revenge

Govindachamy when Kerala High Court confirmed his death sentence The Bible suggests that it is better for one man to die if that death helps others to live better [ John 11: 50 ]. Forgive me for applying that to a criminal today, though Jesus made that statement in a benign theological context. A notorious and hardcore criminal has escaped prison in Kerala. Fourteen years ago he assaulted a young girl who was travelling all alone in a late evening train, going back home from her workplace. The girl jumped out of the running train to save herself from this beast. But he jumped after her and raped her. The postmortem report suggested that he raped her twice, the second being when she had already fallen unconscious. And then he killed her hitting her head with a stone. Do you think that creature is human? I wrote about this back then: A Drop of Tear For You, Soumya . The people of Kerala demanded capital punishment for this creature, the brute called Govindachamy. He is inhu...

Missing Women of Dharmasthala

The entrance to the temple Dharmasthala:  The Shadows Behind the Sanctum Ananya Bhatt, a young medical student from Manipal, visited the Dharmasthala Temple and she never returned to her hostel. She vanished without a trace. That was in 2003. Her mother, Sujata Bhatt, a stenographer working with the CBI, rushed to the temple town in search of her daughter. Some residents told her that they had seen Ananya walking with the temple officials. The local police refused to help in any way. Soon Sujata was abducted by three men, assaulted, and rendered unconscious. She woke up months later in a hospital in Bangalore (Bengaluru). Now more than two decades later, she is back in the temple premises to find her daughter’s remains and perform her last rites. Because a former sanitation worker of the temple came to the local court a few days back with a human skeleton and the confession that he had buried countless schoolgirls in uniform and other young women in the temple premises. This ma...

Gods, Guns and Missionaries

Book Review Title: Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity Author: Manu S Pillai Publisher: Penguin Random House India, 2024 Pages: 564 (about half of which consists of Notes) There never was any monolithic religion called Hinduism. Different parts of India practised Hinduism in its own ways, with its own gods and rituals and festivals. Some of these were even mutually opposed. For example, Vamana who is a revered incarnation of Vishnu in North India becomes a villain in Kerala’s Onam legends. What has become of this protean religion of infinite variety and diversity today in the hands of its ‘missionary’ political leaders? Manu S Pillai’s book ends with V D Savarkar’s contributions to the religion with a subtle hint that it is his legacy that is driving the present version of the religion in the name of Hindutva. The last lines of the book, leaving aside the Epilogue titled ‘What is Hinduism?’, are telltale. “Life did not give Savarkar all he...