Skip to main content

Country where humour died


Humour died a thousand deaths in India after May 2014. The reason – let me put it as someone put it on X. 


The stand-up comedian Kunal Kamra called a politician some names like ‘traitor’ which made his audience laugh because they misunderstood it as a joke. Kunal Kamra has to explain the joke now in a court of justice. I hope his judge won’t be caught with crores of rupees of black money in his store room.

India itself is the biggest joke now. Our courts of justice are huge jokes. Our universities are. Our temples, our textbooks, even our markets. Let alone our Parliament.

I’m studying the Ramayana these days in detail because I’ve joined an A-to-Z blog challenge and my theme is Ramayana, as I wrote already in an earlier post. In order to understand the culture behind Ramayana, I even took the trouble to brush up my little knowledge of Sanskrit by attending a brief course. For proof, here’s part of a lesson in my handwriting. 


The last day taught me some subhashitas (wise epigrams) too. Like the one below: 


Meaning: Beauty is the ornament of a person; Virtue is the ornament of beauty; Wisdom is the ornament of virtue; Forgiveness is the ornament of wisdom.

Forgive the mistakes in my writing; I’m just a novice in this arena where mighty bruisers have been fighting it out for over a decade now. But the point I’d wish to bring here is: Both Ramayana and its language are full of wisdom. Yet why are their followers so boorish and thuggish? Forget their lack of humour.

If I was brought up in the tradition of these – Ramayana and Sanskrit literature – I would have been one of the wisest sages in the world today. Follow this space in April, with the above-mentioned A-to-Z series, and you will understand why.

That’s not the issue, however. The issue is, rather one of them is: How can a man spend crores of rupees building a temple for Lord Rama, install the deity ceremoniously in that temple, claim to be a staunch devotee of that deity, and then go on doing what he has been doing ever since he got tired of doing some job in a railway station or something?

I wish our prime leader and his followers spend some time learning their own epics and scriptures. Seriously.

नरस्याभरणं रूपं रूपस्याभरणं गुणाः
गुणस्याभरणं ज्ञानं ज्ञानस्याभरणं क्षमा

Comments

  1. If you made mistakes in that writing, I wouldn't know it.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Most of my readers wouldn't know. Sanskrit is a dead language, except in dirty politics now.

      Delete
  2. Hari OM
    Not so dead... and I could read it - with only the difficulty that one might have reading anyone else's handwriting. Mine these days is shocking! As to to your question, this is one to be asked of all who put on the trappings but carry none of the pure essence within them... YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The west seems to be more interested in Sanskrit than India. India is merely using it as a political tool.

      Delete
  3. "Beauty is the ornament of a person; Virtue is the ornament of beauty; Wisdom is the ornament of virtue; Forgiveness is the ornament of wisdom." Beautiful!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. A friend and guru of mine, who is a Sanskrit teacher and Director of an educational institution, sent me the following message.

      "According to me ,the translation of this verse would be like this.

      The true beauty of the body lies in good conduct,
      The true beauty of good conduct lies in virtue,
      The true beauty of virtue lies in knowledge,
      And the true beauty of knowledge lies in forgiveness.

      This verse emphasizes the progressive refinement of character, highlighting how each quality enhances the next, with forgiveness being the ultimate expression of wisdom.Your approach to learning the Sanskrit language is truly remarkable. I believe that within a few weeks, you will achieve mastery over the subject. The concepts of the neutral gender and dual number set Sanskrit apart from many other languages, and it’s impressive that you have already begun to understand and apply them effectively.Regards sir. Thank you for sharing this."

      Delete
  4. As replied to Liz. Politics is a dirty business. I like to add the word "cruel" as well.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. And you're right too. In my country, half of the Parliamentarias are people with serious criminal charges.

      Delete
  5. " Humilitas est Veritas." Latin Wisdom. Humility is Truth, standing in all its Beauty and Nakedness/Nudity. And Humour, radically, in its root, is the ability to laugh at oneself. Humility, Truth and Humour are natural bedfellows. And the Proverbial child, who uttered in all his innocence, " Emperor has no clothes" Is an embodiment of all three.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. None of these - humility, truth, innocence - is found in today's political milieu. End justifies the means today, quite like in Mahabharata and a little like in Ramayana too.

      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

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...

The Chhattisgarh Story

Deforestation in Chhattisgarh Kerala’s Catholic Church is teeming with rage these days because of the arrest of two nuns in Chhattisgarh on false charges. No one seems to understand the real politics behind the Modi government’s enmity towards Christian missionaries in Chhattisgarh as well as other backward states in its neighbourhood. Modi is selling the tribal areas and forestlands to the corporate sector part by part, his friend Adani being the chief benefactor. The Christian missionaries are a severe hindrance in that commerce. Let us get some facts right, at least. The Adivasi villagers allege that Gram Sabhas (local governing bodies) were forged or manipulated under pressure from Adani and the BJP government officials in order to take away their lands. In Hasdeo Aranya, minutes of the local body meetings were altered to show the villagers’ consent for land transfers. Also, the Chhattisgarh Scheduled Tribes Commission found that Panchayat secretaries were detained and coerc...

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...

Are human systems repressive?

Salma I had never heard of Salma until she was sent to the Rajya Sabha as a Member of the Parliament by Tamil Nadu a couple of weeks back and a Malayalam weekly featured her on the cover with an interview. Salma’s story made me think on the nature of certain human systems and organisations including religion. Salma was born Rajathi Samsudeen. Marriage made her Rukiya, because her husband’s family didn’t think of Rajathi as a Muslim name. Salma is the pseudonym she chose as a writer. Salma’s life was always controlled by one system or another. Her religion and its ruthlessly patriarchal conventions determined the crests and troughs of her life’s waves. Her schooling ended the day she chose to watch a movie with a friend, another girl whose education was stopped too. They were in class 9. When Rajathi protested that her cousin, a boy, was also watching the same movie at the same time in the same cinema hall, her mother’s answer was, “He’s a boy; boys can do anything.” Rajathi was...