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Is Charley an Escapist?

Illustration by Copilot Designer Charley wants to go back in time and live in the Galesburg of 1894. He belongs to mid-20 th century in Jack Finney’s short story, The Third Level . What triggered his longing for Galesburg of 1894 is his accidental arrival at the third level of New York Grand Central Railway station. Grand Central has only two levels. But Charley lands on a different platform which belongs to the older period. The people’s dress, the ticket counters, the gaslights, the newspaper stand, and the Currier & Ives locomotive all convince Charley that he is standing in the year of 1894. Charley’s grandfather lived in Galesburg. So Charley knows that it is a “wonderful town still, with big old frame houses, huge lawns, and tremendous trees whose branches meet overhead and roof the streets. And in 1894, summer evenings were twice as long, and people sat out on their lawn, the men smoking cigars and talking quietly, the women waving palm-leaf fans, with the fireflies all...

Brainless Facebook

I’m becoming increasingly convinced that Facebook [FB] is for the brainless. No wonder why youngsters have abandoned it and taken to other media such as Instagram. FB censored the links to my blog posts twice in succession last week. The posts are innocuous. 1.      The Napalm Girl : The post is about Kim Phuc, the nine-year-old Vietnamese girl who survived one of the most brutal and absurd wars in human history. FB removed my link merely because the post contained the classical photo of the little girl running in pain. FB’s sense of morality stirred its fervent head. But FB permits utter balderdash written by scoundrels! 2.      Women and Breast Politics : This is the other post that met with FB’s idiosyncratic sense of morality. The post is about how women were made to go bare-chested in Kerala till as recently as the turn of the 20 th century. It contained a couple of pictures which I had copy-pasted from an illustrious Malayalam weekl...

The Napalm Girl

Do you remember the girl in the picture below? The girl who is running naked and crying out in utter helplessness?  She is Kim Phuc . Many of you will recall this picture easily because it is a classic photo that played a role in putting an end to the prolonged Vietnam War (1955-1975). That war remains in human history as one of the most controversial and traumatic conflicts. A futile war in the name of an ideology: communism. Communists and Anti-Communists killed each other with the noble purpose of saving humanity from evils. Like most wars, this one was too a clash of egos. The ego of the capitalist USA versus the ego of the Communist USSR. Capitalism won in the end, they say. But at the cost of millions of lives. Innocent lives. Like what has been happening in Ukraine for nearly three years. In Gaza for over a year. Have you seen little children dying painfully in those countries for no mistake of theirs?   Kim Phuc was one such child in Vietnam. She was nine years o...

The Delights of Travel

On the way to Kupup, Sikkim One of the greatest delights of life is travel. My whole life has been a protracted travel, in a way. I started working as soon as I graduated and the place where I managed to secure a teaching job was Shillong, 3500 km from my home. The train journey lasted nearly four days. It could extend indefinitely depending on the hartals and bandhs called by various political organisations on the way, particularly in Assam which was passing through a turbulent phase in those days. I touched seven states of India during each of those annual journeys, learnt about the politics there, and the cultures of the people. Travel isn’t about reaching your destination; it is about the journey that teaches you, transforms you. Later, as a middle-aged man, I shifted to Delhi. Again long train journeys (until our school offered to foot part of our flight bills). This time our train passed through a few other states. Apart from these annual journeys were the many trips I made...

Women and Breast Politics

Until a century ago, quite many women in Kerala had to go without covering their breasts because of the caste system that was in force. The latest issue of Mathrubhumi weekly [dated 1 Dec 2024] carries a few photos of some Nair women of those days. Let me reproduce two of them below.  Notice the ornaments they wear Up to the 1920s, Kerala’s women were confined to domestic roles. Their lives were regulated by their respective communities. Women belonging to Christian and Muslim communities were expected to cover their breasts while their Hindu counterparts had to leave them bare. Those women from the lower castes had no choice in this matter. However, the Nair women enjoyed a remarkable degree of autonomy because of the matrilineal system that was followed by that community, though the eldest male member known as karanavar wielded the ultimate authority. The Hindu system in those days upheld a lot of evils such as child marriage, denial of education to girls, restrictions on...