Skip to main content

The Paradox of Onam

From the Onam celebrations at my school today 


Kerala has started Onam celebrations, the most colourful and joyful festival of the state. The schools in the state will be closed for a whole week from tomorrow. Even the government offices will not function for most part of the week. Onam is not just a festival, it is the heartbeat of the people of Kerala. 

The legend that sustains Onam is quite paradoxical. Mahabali, or Maveli as he is affectionately called in Kerala, was an Asura king. He was the paragon of goodness though he belonged to species called demons, Asuras. During his reign there was no corruption whatever. People possessed and practised all good qualities. In short, Kerala was a utopia under Maveli's tutelage. 

The gods became jealous. That's the paradox. Gods who should be happy to see humans living happily in peace and harmony became jealous! None but Vishnu himself decided to decimate the utopia on earth. He took the form of a dwarf named Vamana and deceived Maveli. The greatest king who ever ruled on the earth was expelled from his kingdom by the deception of a god. Another paradox is that the king was an asura, a demon. 

Gods are worse than the a demon in this legend. Onam celebrates the goodness of a demon and keeps gods away for a while. 

Appearances can be deceptive, Onam teaches us. Gods can be deceptive and demons may be far more benign. 

We live in a time which Shakespeare's witches would describe best: fair is foul and foul is fair. What comes garbed as religion is actually hate. The present king of the country travels the world preaching the ideal of One earth, one family, one future, when his devotees are killing whole communities of people who don't subscribe to the king's religious and other affiliations. You can be killed while travelling on a train in this country for something like wearing a skull cap. Your dress matters. Your food does too. Many other things matter too. Your house may be bulldozed if you criticise the king. Your office may be raided. A whole tribe can be dispossessed of their homelands within days in this new utopia under construction. 

It's sad times though we were promised Achche din [Happy days]. 

How do we celebrate in sad times? "In the dark times / Will there also be singing?" Bertolt Brecht asked that question. His answer was: "Yes, there will also be singing. / About the dark times." 

Let Maveli return this year too from the netherworld to which he was sent by the gods. Let us sing about his goodness. Let us celebrate the goodness of a demon if only to remind ourselves of the potential for goodness that we all have, even the demons among us.

PS. This post is a part of Blogchatter Half Marathon 2023 

 

Labels:

Comments

  1. Yamini MacLeanAugust 25, 2023 at 2:21 PM

    Hari OM
    Well said, sir! It is a paradox of life that there can be no concept of 'good' without 'bad' to offset it. We are destined always to be fighting for the balance. Onashamsakal! YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 25, 2023 at 6:41 PM

      Thanks, Yam, for the greetings. Wish you too the joys of the season.

      Delete
  2. magiceyeAugust 25, 2023 at 4:54 PM

    Happy Onam! May the Maveli will prevail!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 25, 2023 at 6:42 PM

      Yes, let's strive to create a Maveli kingdom. Happy Onam.

      Delete
  3. Harshita NandaAugust 25, 2023 at 7:16 PM

    You certainly have a knack of taking potshots Sir :) Onashamsakal in advance...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 25, 2023 at 7:26 PM

      Thanks, Harshita. Greetings to you too. Onam is such a contrast to today that potshots come spontaneously.

      Delete
  4. SuchitaAugust 25, 2023 at 9:54 PM

    To think what is being preached right now "a return to the old" of sorts is actually just a return to how I the king define the old. As always your posts help me articulate my anger.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 26, 2023 at 9:55 AM

      How the past is defined - that's the problem. The past is being recreated to suit the political needs of a handful of people.

      Delete
  5. Pandian RamaiahAugust 25, 2023 at 9:58 PM

    Appearances can be deceptive. The story of Karna depicts this also. Someone needs to retell the story from Maveli's perspective. I believe it should have been attempted in Kerala.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 26, 2023 at 9:57 AM

      I'm not sure if anyone has done that seriously. Apart from the legends and songs related to Onam, I'm not sure there are any good works of literature that tried to take a deep look at Maveli.

      Delete
  6. peppylady (Dora)August 26, 2023 at 7:02 AM

    Never heard of Onam.
    Coffee is on, and stay safe.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 26, 2023 at 9:57 AM

      Kerala is just a tiny corner of India, Dora. Don't worry.

      Delete
  7. A student of 12 CAugust 26, 2023 at 7:09 AM

    What's more interesting than a festival which unites all the people in Kerala! I really wish if keralites are united by a common thing, then it'd be great. Unfortunately, I missed the celebration at school due to some family reasons. Anyway, Happy Onam Sir.

    ReplyDelete
  8. marietta pereiraAugust 27, 2023 at 12:42 PM

    Happy Onam! You certainly have told it like it is.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Pooja MahimkarAugust 27, 2023 at 1:58 PM

    Oh! I didn't know of this story, thanks for sharing.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Anupama JoshyAugust 29, 2023 at 12:00 PM

    Happy Onam!

    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

Urban Naxal

Fiction “We have to guard against the urban Naxals who are the biggest threat to the nation’s unity today,” the Prime Minister was saying on the TV. He was addressing an audience that stood a hundred metres away for security reasons. It was the birth anniversary of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel which the Prime Minister had sanctified as National Unity Day. “In order to usurp the Sardar from the Congress,” Mathew said. The clarification was meant for Alice, his niece who had landed from London a couple of days back.    Mathew had retired a few months back as a lecturer in sociology from the University of Kerala. He was known for his radical leftist views. He would be what the PM calls an urban Naxal. Alice knew that. Her mother, Mathew’s sister, had told her all about her learned uncle’s “leftist perversions.” “Your uncle thinks that he is a Messiah of the masses,” Alice’s mother had warned her before she left for India on a short holiday. “Don’t let him infiltrate your brai...
14 comments
Read more

Bihar Election

Satish Acharya's Cartoon on how votes were bought in Bihar My wife has been stripped of her voting rights in the revised electoral roll. She has always been a conscientious voter unlike me. I refused to vote in the last Lok Sabha election though I stood outside the polling booth for Maggie to perform what she claimed was her duty as a citizen. The irony now is that she, the dutiful citizen, has been stripped of the right, while I, the ostensible renegade gets the right that I don’t care for. Since the Booth Level Officer [BLO] was my neighbour, he went out of his way to ring up some higher officer, sitting in my house, to enquire about Maggie’s exclusion. As a result, I was given the assurance that he, the BLO, would do whatever was in his power to get my wife her voting right. More than the voting right, what really bothered me was whether the Modi government was going to strip my wife of her Indian citizenship. Anything is possible in Modi’s India: Modi hai to Mumkin hai .   ...
14 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

Nehru’s Secularism

Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, and Narendra Modi, the present one, are diametrically opposite to each other. Take any parameter, from boorishness to sophistication or religious views, and these two men would remain poles apart. Is it Nehru’s towering presence in history that intimidates Modi into hurling ceaseless allegations against him? Today, 14 Nov, is Nehru’s birth anniversary and Modi’s tweet was uncharacteristically terse. It said, “Tributes to former Prime Minister, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru Ji on the occasion of his birth anniversary.” Somebody posted a trenchant cartoon in the comments section.  Nehru had his flaws, no doubt. He was as human as Modi. But what made him a giant while Modi remains a dwarf – as in the cartoon above – is the way they viewed human beings. For Nehru, all human beings mattered, irrespective of their caste, creed, language, etc. His concept of secularism stands a billion notches above Modi’s Hindutva-nationalism. Nehru’s ide...
12 comments
Read more