Skip to main content

Role Model


The other day a student asked me who my role model was. It’s a dangerous question if it comes from an intelligent person and this student is indeed intelligent. Donkey years ago, when someone hurled this question at me – with a lot of malice – my answer was Mahatma Gandhi. The questioner laughed uproariously. He had reasons to. I was a clownish alcoholic at that time. The questioner was trying to be my well-wisher. Those were days when the entire town of Shillong became my collective well-wisher. One of the best things that people love is to see you as a patient etherized upon their counselling chair. Almost everyone I know in my life is a counsellor. They tell you what to do and what not to. They tell you what a catastrophe you are and how you can be much better with their help. They have all the answers to the rigmarole that you are to yourself.

I was not really joking when I foisted Mahatma Gandhi upon that well-wisher as my role model though I was an alcoholic and I ate all kinds of food including beef. Rice and beef was staple food in Shillong where I worked in those days. Gandhi wouldn’t have bothered about what people ate though he would have suggested the merits of eating potato instead of beef. Potato was the only edible thing that grew without too much fuss in the Khasi Hills. But potato won’t keep you healthy on the cold hills. Gandhi would realise that and let the people be healthy. People mattered to Gandhi as much as cows did, if not more.

When I raised Gandhi on my personal holy pedestal before my well-wisher, what I meant was that I loved Gandhi’s ideological non-violence, his concept of truth and integrity, his idea of tolerance which let people be, his attitude towards religion...  My well-wisher thought Gandhi was all about being a teetotaller. That’s not surprising. He is a good Christian. He thinks Christianity is all about singing Alleluia to Jesus and preaching morality to others.

Gandhi and my well-wisher are thesis and antithesis. Gandhi pursued truth unlike his killer’s fans who now rule India with the conviction that truth is a fabrication of a gang like those who wrote fabricated the caste system or fascism or Nazism or anything of that sort. My well-wisher is now a fan of Modi. He thinks Christianity in India can be saved from Islam today only through Modi.

When my student asked me who my role model was, Modi’s name came on my tongue instinctively. Modi should be everyone’s role model in the post-truth world. You create truths. There is no absolute truth. Everything is god’s leela. Maya is the only truth. Whatever. Go on. Don’t forget to look at the teleprompter. Otherwise your truth may be lost.

“So the teleprompter is your role model?” My student asked.

I smiled. There was no teleprompter to give me an answer. That’s why I don’t ever dare to give a press conference.

“Shouldn’t you be a role model to your students?” My student persisted.

“Can I be a better role model than our Prime Minister?” I asked.

The conversation died. One good thing about role models is that they kill honest conversations.

 

Comments

  1. ...there is a lot to digest here. In American politics, few role models come to mind. Absolute truth seems to be elusive.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hari Om
    Where are the Gandhi's and Mandela's when we need them...?! YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Since history makes heroes rather than vice versa, we may yet wait for the emergence of the new Gandhi.

      Delete
  3. There are modelic people, but every individual person, must to walk his own personal way.

    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

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...

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...

Akbar the Brutal

When I was in school, I was taught that Akbar was a great emperor. ‘Akbar the Great’ was the title of the lesson on him. That was how the emperor was described in history in those days. Now the grade 8 history textbook calls that same man Akbar the Brutal . A lot of efforts are being made to rewrite India’s history. All Muslims are evil in that new history. In fact, everyone except Hindus stands the chance of being accused of much evil. It is sheer coincidence that I started reading Manu S Pillai’s new book, Gods, Guns and Missionaries , soon after reading newspaper reports about the alleged brutality of the Mughals. In the very first chapter, Pillai presents Akbar as a serious spiritual seeker as well as advocate of religious tolerance. Pillai’s knowledge of history is vast if the 218 pages of Notes in the book are any indication. Chapter 1, titled ‘Monsters and Missionaries’, starts with three Jesuit missionaries led by Rodolfo Acquaviva visiting Akbar on a personal invitatio...

The Parish Ghost

Illustration by Copilot Designer Fiction Father Joseph woke up hearing two sounds. One was his wall clock striking the midnight hour. The other was totally unfamiliar, esoteric. Like the faint sigh of someone too weary to knock at heaven’s door. Father Joseph thought it was the wind. Until the scent of jasmine, oddly out of season, began to haunt his bedroom in the presbytery which was just a few score metres from the parish cemetery. “Is someone there?” Father Joseph asked without getting up. He was more than a bit scared. He never liked this presbytery which was too close to the cemetery. But he had to endure it until his next transfer. “Yes, father,” an unearthly voice answered. From too close, not outside the room. “Pathrose.” “Pathrose who?” A family name was mentioned in answer. “But that family…” Father Joseph’s voice quivered, “no one of that family is alive as far as I know.” “You’re right,” Pathrose said. “We perished because we were too poor to survive what our...