Skip to main content

Authenticity


Too many people lead fake lives and hence the world is a sad place. Our pursuits are fake, borrowed from others. We hanker after wealth because everybody seems to do just that. It can be power or glamour or something similar that catches our fancy. We dedicate our entire life to the pursuit of fanciful goals. Even our religion is a fancy item.

If wealth could give us happiness, the wealthiest people on the earth would be the happiest too. You can replace wealth with power or glamour or any such thing and the statement will remain valid with the necessary modifications.

The classical Russian writer, Leo Tolstoy, dramatized the futility of our common pursuits in the story of Ivan Ilyich. Ivan led a very inauthentic life. His pursuits were superficial.

Ivan is a successful person by worldly standards. He has money and influence. He is the pride of his family. What he has done all his life is to follow the example of the successful people. He imitated their manners and accepted their views as his own. He became a magistrate and then a prosecutor. He aspired to be the presiding judge but did not get that position. But he got a coveted position in the ministry with a high salary.

Ivan lives a luxurious life. He has money. He shows off his affluence too with “damasks, ebony, flowers, carpets and bronzes.” Exactly like the other affluent people. All the affluent people have similar lifestyles, views and creeds. Affluence is a kind of religion with its own rites and rituals. The problem with that religion, however, is that it does not touch the heart. It remains at the most superficial levels of human activities. Hence it can never bring deep contentment. It can never give anyone any sense of personal fulfilment.

Consequently, it tends to make people disgruntled. People begin to feel the pinch of inner hollowness sooner or later. Ivan too is haunted by that hollowness. There is no love in his heart for anyone. He is estranged from his own wife and daughter. Unhappiness leads to a fatal illness. When he is dying, his wife feels happy. She thinks she will be saved from his self-aggrandizing ways. But then she realises with horror that the family will be deprived of the huge salary he has been bringing in. Even his death cannot save her, she realises with a pang. Even that pang is superficial. She is yet another of the millions of superficial people on the earth.

Gerasim, on the other hand, is a genuinely happy person because he lives an authentic life. He is Ivan’s nurse. Character-wise, he is everything that Ivan is not. He is compassionate. Empathy motivates his actions. He makes meaningful bonds with fellow humans around him. He has no issues with putting Ivan’s legs on his shoulders in order to reduce the dying man’s pain. Gerasim is a man who follows his heart.

Following your heart is the most fundamental key to authentic existence. Most human pursuits take people away from their own hearts. Even their religions do nowadays.

Have you ever tried to listen to your heart? Have you ever sat on the bank of a river or on the sands of a beach all alone looking into the core of your own heart? A rock on a mountain or a tree in your backyard may perform the same miracle, if you care.

Gerasim, in Tolstoy’s story, is not a rich man. But he is a happy man. Contentment belongs to your own heart. It’s only a matter of discovering it there. That discovery, however, requires authenticity. Authenticity is the most fundamental condition for happiness.

PS. This post is the beginning of my #BlogchatterA2Z 2023

Comments

  1. Leo Tolstoy, salt of the earth.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, Tolstoy was a very spiritual writer. Salt of the earth, Light of the world...

      Delete
  2. Very true. Be authentic and everything else will follow

    ReplyDelete
  3. Ivan reminded me of Dorian Gray. We seem to be always running away from something. I wonder why we fear slowing down so much.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Discontentment, I suppose. Never satisfied with anything.

      Delete
  4. Food for thought. true, superficiality thrives today.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Probably it thrived all the time. People are like that. Some mutation has to happen.

      Delete
  5. No wonder they say happiness comes from within. You are absolutely correct in saying we all live artificial lives. For example I chased engineering and the IIT's because of the glamour attached to them.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You are one of the finest individuals I have come across, Jai. And you are not fake at all.

      Delete
  6. very nice article, the message you give from it is very nice. so always follow your heart and be happy from bottom of your heart. very nice, thank you.
    Take some time to check our website and give us some tips and guide.
    https://www.tabslogic.com/

    ReplyDelete
  7. I haven't read Ivan Ilyich so it was quite a treat to read this post.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Contentment belongs to your own heart... A beautifully penned post. Will look forward for more. All the best

    ReplyDelete
  9. Hari OM
    "A"pproriate start to your month of alphabets! YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Let me hope that the month will go fine. And thanks to you for being with me regularly. You have made a positive difference in my attitude towards writing.

      Delete
  10. Authenticity is lost in the world of Jumlas sadly.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The worst is that jumla is accepted as dharma in Kurukshetra.

      Delete
  11. A lovely read ! People like Gerasim are miniscule in today's world which is filled with greed.

    ReplyDelete
  12. Contentment belongs to your own heart! Truer words were never spoken. Tolstoy had so many maxims that ring true. Better to be a Gerasim than an Ivan!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tolstoy had God's signature in his heart, so to say.

      Delete
  13. It is so true that once you embrace your own true self, nothing else matters. You don't have to pretend to be something that you do not like.

    ReplyDelete
  14. How very very true Sir...authenticity is rare to find these days...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Masks are inevitable! The king has too many of them!

      Delete
  15. You have rightfully pointed out the holloweness of putting up a facade

    ReplyDelete
  16. Authenticity is akin to conscience as well. Listen to it and you will never be unhappy.

    ReplyDelete
  17. Contentment belongs to your own heart. It’s only a matter of discovering it there.
    So rightly put 👏🏻
    Haven't read this story. Will be checking it out now

    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

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...

India in Modi-Trap

That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. Illustration by Gemini AI A friend forwarded a WhatsApp message written by K Sahadevan, Malayalam writer and social activist. The central theme is a concern for science education and research in India. The writer bemoans the fact that in India science is in a prison conjured up by Narendra Modi. The message shocked me. I hadn’t been aware of many things mentioned therein. Modi is making use of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan’s Centre for Study and Research in Indology for his nefarious purposes projected as efforts to “preserve and promote classical Indian knowledge systems [IKS]” which include Sanskrit, Ayurveda, Jyotisha (astrology), literature, philosophy, and ancient sciences and technology. The objective is to integrate science with spirituality and cultural values. That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. The IKS curricula have made umpteen r...

Joys of Onam and a reflection

Suppose that the whole universe were to be saved and made perfect and happy forever on just one condition: one single soul must suffer, alone, eternally. Would this be acceptable? Philosopher William James asked that in his 1891 book, The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life . Please think about it once again and answer the question for yourself. You, as well as others, are going to live a life without a tinge of sorrow. Joyful existence. Life in Paradise. The only condition is that one person will take up all the sorrows of the universe on him-/herself and suffer – alone, eternally. What do you say? James’s answer is a firm no . “Not even a god would be justified in setting up such a scheme,” James asserted, knowing too well how the Bible justified a positive answer to his question. “It is expedient that one man should die for the people, so that the nation can be saved” [John 11:50]. Jesus was that one man in the Biblical vision of redemption. I was reading a Malayalam period...

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...