Skip to main content

Yesterdays



Have you noticed how flimsy our memories are? What we remember is not what really happened. Our memories twist the reality according to our psychological needs. We apply soothing balms on painful memories. We exaggerate the sweet memories. As times passes, the reality and its memory may become totally different.

My yesterdays are largely a continuum of pain of different tinctures and decibels. A childhood of horrors conjured up by the adults in my life and an adulthood haunted by the ghosts of my childhood. Is it all nothing more than my memory? Is my memory a true chronicle of what actually happened?

One of my favourite Malayalam poets, O N V Kurup, composed a touching song about memories and nostalgia. The poet persona longs to return to the courtyard of his childhood where sweet memories amble. He would love to sway the gooseberry tree there once again. The berry’s bitterness and sourness and eventual sweetness effervesce in his memories. He longs to sit on the bank of the old river and return the call of the koel. There’s a lot of longing in that song. Sweet desires. Sweet memories. Lucky man, I feel envy.

I didn’t have a fraction of such luck. Never mind. There are a lot of people who didn’t have happy pasts and yet went on to break even or triumph too. Our yesterdays need not determine our todays and tomorrows. History is not where we live. History is what we make up as we get on with life.

We can even remove a few centuries from our history if we are not comfortable with it as our present government has done with the Mughal history in the school textbooks. After all, how much of all that history we studied is quite true? They taught us about the victors. What about the losers? What about the marginalised? Did history belong to them at all? Whose is history?

Is history a collection of the lies of the victors? And the self-delusions of the vanquished? A merger of imperfect memories and inadequate documentation?

Our yesterdays are more evanescent than our todays. Hazier than our tomorrows.

The heroes back there had feet of clay but we alchemised clay into gold. The idols were as feeble as ourselves but we reshaped them in tungsten. We still keep transmuting our gods.

Our yesterday goes back beyond Jesus and Krishna. Beyond Dwapara yuga and Treta yuga. Back to a Big Bang. That was the time when we were all one. Science calls it Singularity.

If I were O N V Kurup, I’d probably write a song about returning to that Singularity to answer the call of the first koel, the primordial music of the cosmos.

PS. This post is part of #BlogchatterA2Z 2023

Previous Post: Xenophobia

Coming up tomorrow [the last post in this series]: Z of life

Comments

  1. DeepikaApril 28, 2023 at 9:29 AM

    Absolutely true. Our past memories are just what we want to remember i guess, and the way we want to remember it. I had a beautiful memory of a picturesque picnic spot in shimla, i some forest. Went there with my children and found it less then charming. Maybe the fun i had with my friends is what made the place special

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 28, 2023 at 9:34 AM

      Exactly. It's all relative. And the place changes too. The river in my village which is the sweetest memory in my consciousness is today an ungainly sight. Reality shifts. Memory confuses.

      Delete
  2. CareenaApril 28, 2023 at 10:04 AM

    Thoughtful post. Yesterday can be anything i want it to be so lets just move on~~

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 28, 2023 at 11:22 AM

      What else? We have hardly any choice unless we want expend our energies in rewriting the past.

      Delete
  3. Yamini MacLeanApril 28, 2023 at 4:31 PM

    Hari OM
    All our yesterdays, regardless how we choose to recall them, result in who we are today. It is in the today that we can take responsibility, if we so choose, as to who we leave in this moment and who we become as we move forward. Ah, the great Singularity...Tat Twam Asi! YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
  4. AnonymousApril 28, 2023 at 5:20 PM

    Very true -christine cmlk79.blogspot.com

    ReplyDelete
  5. Harshita NandaApril 28, 2023 at 8:17 PM

    How very true sir, our yesterdays stop at that singularity

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 28, 2023 at 10:40 PM

      If all of us realise that, life would be much happier.

      Delete
  6. WaterApril 28, 2023 at 11:47 PM

    very true. Our history is on the pages and our present is still in the ink awaiting its fate to become the valued words or less valued one...Life never stops on history but moves forward towards future leaving its imprints in the past for admiration and praise and a path paver for my present. Yes in past clay was used later on we started using various metals including gold. Enlightening.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 29, 2023 at 7:38 AM

      I mentioned feet of clay metaphorically. You're right, history won't ever hold life back. It moves on.

      Delete
  7. AmbicaApril 29, 2023 at 7:42 AM

    Yesterday no more. I live by this principle, only Now is important. And like everyone else, I love the song of Koel. For many days, it would sing on a tree near my house, seems to have gone now.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 29, 2023 at 10:01 AM

      May your koel return to sing for you again and again.

      Delete
  8. akash guptaJanuary 15, 2024 at 6:27 PM


    Well done! Your travel & tour articles are both informative and easy to follow. Loved the real-world examples. Keep up the excellent work!
    Delhi to ayodhya Flight

    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...
19 comments
Read more

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...
8 comments
Read more

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...
14 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