True Courage

DEATH said it

Tiffany Aching said it

Sam Vimes said it

Granny Weatherwax said it

“Evil begins when you begin treating people as things.”

Of course Terry Pratchett said it…through them all.

And if you think about it, most of our problems stem from just this…

“He should move away/die/believe only me/ walk only in tight circles/… for me to succeed/ be happy…” 

he=Thing

“She should wear only saris/ think in whispers/ live in seclusion/be my slave….then all will be right in this world” 

she= thing

Once people stop being irrational, weird people in our books... once they stop being human beings with joys and sorrows in our eyes and become things that can be changed/controlled/ subdued according to OUR whims and fancies…that's when the trouble starts and evil brews.

Letting people be people requires courage.

Understanding others despite differences in culture/sex/social status/religion requires courage. 

And true courage is rare.

I remember a newspaper picture of an old man, wearing white sitting alone in a room with a walking stick held tight between both hands. The background was black and the tables and chairs in the background had merged into their shadows. It made him stand out more in his white clothes. 

The picture held my gaze while the story below was of a courage so rare that it made me stare harder at the picture of the old man with the walking stick and eyes looking away from the camera...a picture of grim repose.

That old man had handed over his only son to the police because he found him raping a minor. 

In our society, people have been known to harbour criminal relatives and paint them as pillars of society just to save face...because we want no one to know the depths of depravity in our family. It helps us hold our head high in public. Yet this man had not done that.

He had not treated that minor as a thing to be suppressed under the cloak of his family's respectability.

He had courageously stood up against the wrong and even admitted to it in public...he had treated that child as a person not a thing.

That's true courage.

It's not just me...

I thought I was the only one...

The only one who couldn’t review books.

I love books and if I don’t read anything in a day the day feels incomplete...yet for the life of me I find rating books even books that didn’t catch my fancy as hard ... 

I feel completely inept in saying what I liked or disliked about a book. 

I had accepted it as one of my unworkable flaws till I read this...

“But while I can read Middlemarch and the Dunciad…as happily as anyone, I have this little region missing in my brain, that extra lobe that literature students possess as a matter of course, the lobe that allows them the detachment and the nerve to talk about books (texts they will say) as others might talk about the composition of a treaty or the structure of a cell. I can remember at school how we would read together in class an Ode by Keats, a Shakespeare sonnet or a chapter of animal farm. I would tingle inside and want to sob, just at the words, at the simple progression of sounds. But when the time came to writing that thing called an Essay, I flubbed and floundered. I could never discover where to start.”

“How do you find the distance and the cool to write in an academically approved style about something that makes you spin, wobble and weep?”

-Stephen Fry in Making History 

Of course there are books that I love and books that I leave without a thought...yet it seems somehow sacrilegious to sit down and note the good and the uninteresting parts.

There are many books that I dislike but I dislike them because I either have outgrown them or have never grown into them.

Love stories rank high in that list of dislikes.

I blame my mom’s collection of Woman’s Era for this!

My mom had a collection of these fabulous magazines…they must have been from the 1960’s because the ones she had were published in Britain. She took them out with her pile of other stored loves once a year…and those few weeks that they were aired I read them.

Stories that looked like this... though I don't know if this was from Woman's Era

The fact that I read them again and again very year from the time I was 6 to the time I was 15 made those short love stories and serials a part of me…so much so that when I was introduced to my first Mills and Boons in school I left it after the first few pages because I just knew what was going to happen in the next hundred odd pages and worse it was not as gripping!

Yes, fans would disagree with me but those earlier stories were indelible from my mind and after those years of immersion nothing ever came close to them.

So I love, love stories but have never grown into any other…

Memory.

The full stop in the heading was intentional. Memory is not a word it's a never ending sentence...but with these few memories I wish to enchain the past and stop it from fading.

There are a few things I shouldn't forget...

My first school birthday party, the first time an eagle almost landed on my head, the big doll with blinking eyes that I never really played with, the first pup who widdled into my life...there's so much that I was forgetting

And now I wonder because my memory stretches far. I remember words, expressions and smells and sometimes I feel I remember what I wanted to happen as what happened. Does that happen to others too?

And filling spaces between memories of relationships are memories of certain books. The time I first read them is firmly drawn in my mind and every time I see their cover or read about the author that memory comes rushing back…

Richard Bach:

I am in class 8 or 9, so I must be around 13 or 14. I am going back home from my yearly Delhi visit, travelling in a state run, non-ac rickety bus with my mom and I am reading The Bridge Across Forever. The searing heat, the dusty wind the torn butt-aching seats are lost in the background while I read about Bach and his soul mate Leslie. At that age the mere fact that I am reading a love story makes me feel big enough to unscramble the awaiting adult years…wish it were that easy…

Then as I read I realized that its not just a plain vanilla soppy love story it also talks of the many spiritual dimensions of this love… I am in absolute adult-understanding heaven! Of course now I realize why soap operas with villainous aunts and conniving cousins never ever entertained me again…

It spoilt me forever… made me expect more out of books and people. As the wise say: expectations lead to disappointments but that’s another story.

What I remember: Leslie and Bach accomplishing the astral projection of their bodies in shimmering souls and seeing their beloved cat also do that along with them!