Skip to main content

On fables and grandmothers...

There is a hare and a tortoise who wish to have a race. The hare runs swiftly, goes ahead to win the race. Seems a plausible one line alternative to the classic version that we grew up hearing, doesn't it? But it would be difficult to find this version in Aesop's Fables.

Yet, it seems strange that we as kids accepted the story of the hare and the tortoise without doubt when our parents or grandmothers read it to us. Now, it seems hard to believe.

The trouble with the fables is that they are meant to amuse and instruct, and are written for kids. The writer assumes an ideal world, where everything goes according to some master plan that he may have in mind. Reality may be very different. What will happen when the thin ice breaks and a child sees reality for the first time, so far removed from the fables that he has heard?

Yet, the ideal world continues to haunt us throughout life. In school, we are always taught stuff in the ideal world. Non-ideal is too hard to deal with, so we conveniently ignore it. We go ahead to become engineers. Again, we are taught the ideal, and told that the world is non-ideal, so we need to deal with it. Some can, most of the others, so immersed in the ideal, cannot.

A friend criticised me for not sticking to one topic and drifting so much in the course of a single post. In an ideal world, with all things uncorrelated (a white noise process), it might have been possible. Yet, in the non-ideal head that I have, many thoughts are correlated, and it becomes difficult to control the drift.

Which makes me realize that the drift is indeed becoming dangerous. So, I go back to the main reason I wrote this post.

Indeed, most of the books that I read too may have the same ideal world described. Harry Potter for one. But I refrain from criticising that any more. The last time I criticised the series, I lost some friends on facebook. No, I shall refrain from criticising any particular book, but just mention some of the books wherein the world is too ideal to be real. Heidi, by Johanna Spyri, is a great book, with a lot of freshness and innocence, but the portrayal of life is too ideal to be true. Nevertheless, it remains one of my favourites.

Jim Stovall's novel, The Ultimate Gift too seems to be too ideal to be true. I mean, considering the spoilt brat that Jason was, would he actually go soil his arms working on a farm, just based on some crazy whim of his grandfather?

But now that I think of it, almost all books have a central theme, a protagonist overcomes intense conflict and against all odds, goes on to succeed. Would this not be true only in an ideal world, or in cases of extreme luck? I think so. Yet a book without an intense conflict followed by an eventual victory of the protagonist would not be as popular.

Why is it that we so like the ideal carefree world, in contrast to the cruel world out here? Why do we fool ourselves by thinking that such a world really is possible? It is indeed a dangerous act, to forget that we live in a really cruel world, and to seek comfort in the ideal world that writers would have us believe exists.


I missed posting on international women's day. Now, it is too late to post anything substantial, however, I leave you with this video of Harry Belafonte singing Man smart (Woman smarter)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

ERROR_SUCCESS

ERROR_SUCCESS. This macro would be familiar to all those who have done some programming in WIN32. It is the output of the GetLastError() function to check the thread's last error state when no error has occurred. Weird, isn't it? I mean, if it is a success, then why is it marked as an error in the macro? This is one example of a badly made API. APIs are considered bad when programming in them becomes non-intuitive. Software is said to be bad (or said to suck) when it seems counter-intuitive to the user. There is one very simple example of this. Start notepad. Type in any text. Click on close. The message that you see is: This makes no sense to me as a user. Of course, the programmer follows the approach that he creates a temporary file called Untitled , and in that file he allows the user to make all his changes. But how am I, as a user to understand that? A similar disconnect occurs even between two different programmers. That is why it takes a whole lot of effort to make

On Harry Potter and why I dislike the series

There could not be a better time for this post. There could not have been a worse time for this post. Now that the penultimate movie of the series is out, and my facebook wall filled with people who loved the movie. But this is something I really wanted to say, and I shall say it anyway. Harry Potter is pathetic literature. Now, you must be wondering why I say that. There are many reasons. Firstly, the storyline itself is flawed. When a writer sits down to write anything, he/she must set up some essential rules about what is happening. These rules must remain constant irrespective of how many times he/she changes his/her mind. This is so that the readers are allowed to have some sensibility in what they are reading. In the fourth book, Rowling goes ahead and kills Cedric. Then, at the end of the book, the horseless carriages are there again. Nothing special. We all knew that they are horseless. But then comes the fifth book, and BAM, the horses are actually winged beasts that only thos

Elements of a Story: The Whispers

I'm compelled to begin each post with a meta. That way, my blog posts seem less like essays or dissertations, and more like diary entries, or web logs. So here goes... I started this blog a little over a year ago. The main purpose of this blog was to experiment with styles of writing, and find an effective outlet for all the subjects I wish to rant about; saving my classmates the agony of having to listen to them. As I wrote this blog, I've experimented with so many styles, and have received comments claiming that my work is a shameless copy greatly inspired by so-and-so author/work. Fact is that I simply chanced upon that style. I read, so obviously, my work shall reflect the styles of those I admire, but I've worked out so many styles without even knowing that they exist, only to be informed of them later. Recently, I've been struck with the seeming absence of whispers as an element of a story. The more I've thought of the subject, the more I've been convince