Skip to main content

Institutionalised Evils

 Bernard Shaw's play, Captain Brassbound's Conversion, is a study of various kinds of evils or follies masquerading as virtues. Justice is in focus particularly. What we imagine as justice is often nothing more than revenge.

In the play, Howard who is a judge and his sister-in-law Cicely who is an explorer arrive at the residence of Rankin, a Presbyterian minister in Morocco. Howard's brother Miles was a friend of Rankin. Miles is no more. He had married a local woman and moved to Brazil where he died. Howard believes that the widow and her family members seized all the wealth of Miles. He used the judiciary to grab that wealth for himself.

Cicely wants to explore Morocco and Rankin arranges a guide, Captain Brassbound. It turns out that Brassbound is Miles's son and he seeks to take revenge on Judge Howard for the injustice he perpetrated on the bereaved family of Miles in the name of justice.

"Justice!" exclaims the judge. "I think you mean vengeance, disguised as justice by your passions."

Brassbound's response is that the judge's justice is nothing more than vengeance either - "the vengeance of society, disguised as justice by its passions." The state pays the judges to wreak vengeance on certain people - often the poor and the helpless.

Can you imagine justice catching up with the affluent and the powerful? They can take lakhs of crores of rupees as loans from public sector banks and never repay. The state writes off their loans. When a poor person is unable to repay his loan of a few thousand rupees, his little property will be confiscated and his children thrown on the streets. Justice.

The state which rakes in nearly two lakh crore rupees in the form of GST alone every month - forgetting the other countless taxes we all pay every moment - has no money for welfare schemes meant for the weaker sections. But the leaders have all the luxury imaginable. Organised theft becomes a virtue just because the government sanctions it.

There are many other organised crimes masquerading as virtues or religion or nationalism in India today. We are deluding ourselves or letting someone who imagines himself as a global Messiah delude us in the names of cow protection or defence of culture or national language, and so on.

Bernard Shaw's play mentioned above ends with a charismatic but rather unrefined person wielding an exotic charm on Cicely. Sheer luck saves her from self-destruction, however. She knows that she is being drawn mysteriously, almost supernaturally, to a force which she doesn't like, which she can't like. But fortune favours her. "How glorious! How glorious! And what an escape!" are her last words, the last words of the play.

All are not as fortunate as Cicely, however.

I don't know why the following pics find their place in this post!






Comments

  1. Yamini MacLeanNovember 8, 2023 at 4:36 PM

    Hari OM
    Would that this was only an Indian problem - sadly this popuplist form of governement looms large in the world just now, the behaviours common to all such governments, the constantly crying nationally poor whilst living individually megarich... YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 8, 2023 at 8:08 PM

      True, Yam, the situation has changed all over the world - almost. Maybe, the concept of Kali Yug is not altogether a myth.

      Delete
  2. magiceyeNovember 8, 2023 at 5:03 PM

    Ironic that a leader so popular needs security!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Liz A.November 8, 2023 at 10:45 PM

    Society created rules to benefit the rich. One of these days we'll wake up to the fact there are more of us than there are of them.

    ReplyDelete
  4. peppylady (Dora)November 9, 2023 at 3:11 AM

    Lot of places is loosing the middle class.
    Coffee is on.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 9, 2023 at 5:01 AM

      Sadly impoverishing system though the opposite was the promise.

      Delete
  5. CareenaNovember 23, 2023 at 1:59 PM

    I can only think of what we in our limited capacities can do here. Write blog posts, that to is no less dangerous these days, but maybe we will have to if only to be able to look at ourselves in the mirror.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 23, 2023 at 6:57 PM

      Yes, we are in an Orwellian kingdom. Helpless. I can afford to write like this just because I live in Kerala.

      Delete

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

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

Mother Mary Comes to Me

Book Review In one of the first pages of this book, the author cautions us to “read this book as you would a novel.” No one can remember the events of their lives accurately. Roy says that “most of us are a living, breathing soup of memory and imagination … and we may not be the best arbiters of which is which.” What you remember may not be what happened exactly. As we get on with the painful process called life, we keep rewriting our own narratives. The book does read like a novel. Not because Roy has fictionalised her and her mother’s lives. The characters of these two women are extremely complex, that’s why. Then there is Roy’s style which transmutes everything including anger and despair into lyrical poetry. There’s a lot of pain and sadness in this book. The way Roy narrates all that makes it quite a classic in the genre of memoirs. The book is not so much about Roy’s mother Mary as about that mother’s impact on the daughter’s very being. Arundhati was born in the undivided ...
14 comments
Read more

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...
2 comments
Read more