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

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

      Delete
  3. Very true -christine cmlk79.blogspot.com

    ReplyDelete
  4. How very true sir, our yesterdays stop at that singularity

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

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

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

      Delete

  7. 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

The Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation

Cats and Love

No less a psychologist than Freud said that the “time spent with cats is never wasted.” I find time to spend with cats precisely for that reason. They are not easy to love, particularly if they are the country variety which are not quite tameable, and mine are those. What makes my love affair with my cats special is precisely their unwillingness to befriend me. They’d rather be in their own company. “In ancient time, cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this,” Terry Pratchett says. My cats haven’t, I’m sure. Pratchett knew what he was speaking about because he loved cats which appear frequently in his works. Pratchett’s cats love independence, very unlike dogs. Dogs come when you call them; cats take a message and get back to you as and when they please. I don’t have dogs. But my brother’s dogs visit us – Maggie and me – every evening. We give them something to eat and they love that. They spend time with us after eating. My cats just go away without even a look af