Skip to main content

Helpless Gods

Illustration by Gemini


Six decades ago, Kerala’s beloved poet Vayalar Ramavarma sang about gods that don’t open their eyes, don’t know joy or sorrow, but are mere clay idols. The movie that carried the song was a hit in Kerala in the late 1960s. I was only seven when the movie was released. The impact of the song, like many others composed by the same poet, sank into me a little later as I grew up. Our gods are quite useless; they are little more than narcissists who demand fresh and fragrant flowers only to fling them when they wither.

Six decades after Kerala’s poet questioned the potency of gods, the Chief Justice of India had a shoe flung at him by a lawyer for the same thing: questioning the worth of gods. The lawyer was demanding the replacement of a damaged idol of god Vishnu and the Chief Justice wondered why gods couldn’t take care of themselves since they are omnipotent. The lawyer flung his shoe at the Chief Justice to prove his devotion to a god.

From Vayalar of 1967 to the lawyer of 2025, India has come a long way: from liberal secularism to emotive fanaticism. If Vayalar were to write today, he would be killed by the country’s right-wing riffraff.

When North India silenced the shoe-flinging incident because the lawyer who committed the atrocity was high caste and the Chief Justice a Dalit, another far more bone-rattling case emerged in Vayalar’s own Kerala. Half a kilogram of gold went missing from the most famous temple of the state: Sabarimala. The deity was incapable of protecting his own property! What use are such gods? Chief Justice Gavai would wish to ask.

B R Ambedkar, father of India’s Constitution, declared a century ago that “God is a useless thing for the purposes of the human life.” B R Gavai, the Chief Justice of India today, is an Ambedkarite. On multiple occasions, Gavai has publicly reaffirmed Ambedkar's vision of an inclusive and just India. He has emphasized that the Indian Constitution, as a living document, continues to uphold the values of liberty, equality, and fraternity that Ambedkar championed. Constitution, not the 33 crore gods of the country’s pantheon.

Ambedkar’s portrait was removed from the Delhi Chief Minister’s office soon after BJP’s Rekha Gupta assumed office in February 2025. This lady had the audacity to state that the Brahmins who “ignited the flame of knowledge in the country” also worshipped weapons. “Only through weapons and scriptures can we protect society and the country today,” she said reinforcing the obsolete caste system.  

Unnikrishnan Potti, a Brahmin, was stealing Lord Ayappan’s gold when Rekha Gupta was proclaiming the glory of Brahmins.

Helpless Ayappan. Do our other gods fare any better?

Gods who can’t open their eyes, who can’t laugh or cry… the poet laments. And the politicians laugh all the way to their respective thrones.


When a politician kneels publicly, check your wallet—and your rights. They're usually reaching for one or the other.


PS. This post is a part of Blogchatter Half Marathon 2025

 

Comments

  1. Jose D. MaliekalOctober 25, 2025 at 5:23 AM

    Great and Deep Reflections for the morning. I like the Chief Justice's attitude of non-chaklance, over the incident. " Let us carry on with the work. Things like this do not bother me.. " Perhaps, if he had penned the Babari Masjid Judgement and owned it by signing it, Indus's secular Face would stood out better. Far cry from Chandrachud's cryptic but blatant Brahminism.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalOctober 25, 2025 at 9:19 AM

      The CJ displayed greatness of personality with that nonchalance. The lawyer didn't deserve any attention but that solemn indifference. Chandrachud pretended to be liberal.

      Delete
  2. Liz A.October 25, 2025 at 7:18 AM

    Very true. Your wallet or your rights. Or both.

    ReplyDelete
  3. HaddockOctober 25, 2025 at 10:34 AM

    A blogpost worth reading. Anyone with a little common sense can judge what is right and what is wrong. But the ones with common sense are being scarce now a days in our country (and in the world at large)

    ReplyDelete
  4. Yamini MacLeanOctober 25, 2025 at 2:41 PM

    Hari Om
    My thoughts went along the same lines as Haddock's... and clearly the shoe thrower cannot see himself as observers do... as nothing more than a toddler having a tantrum. YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalOctober 25, 2025 at 8:45 PM

      That's why I suppose the CJ just ignored it. The best he could have done.

      Delete
  5. Chinmayee Gayatree SahuOctober 25, 2025 at 8:37 PM

    An amusing read I must say ! Common sense has left the room in the current times I would say.

    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

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 .   ...
16 comments
Read more

The Art of Subjugation: A Case Study

Two Pulaya women, 1926 [Courtesy Mathrubhumi ] The Pulaya and Paraya communities were the original landowners in Kerala until the Brahmins arrived from the North with their religion and gods. They did not own the land individually; the lands belonged to the tribes. Then in the 8 th – 10 th centuries CE, the Brahmins known as Namboothiris in Kerala arrived and deceived the Pulayas and Parayas lock, stock, and barrel. With the help of religion. The Namboothiris proclaimed themselves the custodians of all wealth by divine mandate. They possessed the Vedic and Sanskrit mantras and tantras to prove their claims. The aboriginal people of Kerala couldn’t make head or tail of concepts such as Brahmadeya (land donated to Brahmins becoming sacred land) or Manu’s injunctions such as: “Land given to a Brahmin should never be taken back” [8.410] or “A king who confiscates land from Brahmins incurs sin” [8.394]. The Brahmins came, claimed certain powers given by the gods, and started exploi...
15 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 music of an ageing man

Having entered the latter half of my sixties, I view each day as a bonus. People much younger become obituaries these days around me. That awareness helps me to sober down in spite of the youthful rush of blood in my indignant veins. Age hasn’t withered my indignation against injustice, fraudulence, and blatant human folly, much as I would like to withdraw from the ringside and watch the pugilism from a balcony seat with mellowed amusement. But my genes rage against my will. The one who warned me in my folly-ridden youth to be wary of my (anyone’s, for that matter) destiny-shaping character was farsighted. I failed to subdue the rages of my veins. I still fail. That’s how some people are, I console myself. So, at the crossroads of my sixties, I confess to a dismal lack of emotional maturity that should rightfully belong to my age. The problem is that the sociopolitical reality around me doesn’t help anyway to soothe my nerves. On the contrary, that reality is almost entirely re...
15 comments
Read more