Roshanama

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"The poison of our world is the fairy tales we tell our children. There is not one that speaks of real life where there is no happy ending"

.....Hrithik Roshan, actor, on fairy tales (ToI, Wednesday August 10)

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There must be some journalistic goof-up there. I just can't imagine a tinsel town hero born with a tinsel-spoon in his tinsel mouth can make such a sweeping statement against fairy tales. He must have been misquoted or at least quoted out of context.

But it is not any upstart rag but the old maid of Bombay, the Times of India, in its Editorial Page and with a picture of the hero to boot.

It just happened that today I got a mail from Pratik saying, inter alia:

"I am reading your blogs off and on. Among the July ones `Importance of Fairy Tales' was matchless. I shall start Guareschi soon."

http://gpsastry.blogspot.com/2011/07/importance-of-fairy-tales.html

And Pratik is as good if not better in telling fairy tales in Physics than I to our students {;-}

There is another consummate Physicist, Aniket, who said:

"My father, who entertained us with stories at bedtime on a regular basis, always told me that for the purpose of a good narrative it was never necessary to stick to facts..."

The few readers of this blog know that these are full of tall fairy tales. Still they seem to read them compulsively.

I asked another gifted Physicist, Supratim, why he reads my nonsense knowing that it is big gul. And he said some of them give him 'hope' and yet others are 'strangely uplifting'.

I guess he said a mouthful. All fairy tales lift us up from the drudgery of mundane existence despite the fact that we know them to be mere stories.

The three kids I quoted above are, well, on the wrong side of 30.

In my blog on Fairy tales I said:

"She (Ishani) is just 1.6 years old; and I am waiting for her to attain the glorious 2-year-old-age. For I am bubbling with enthu to tell her all sorts of Fairy Tales, with top spin as I go."

And quoted Margherita:

"I intend to tell my children fairy tales until they're at least twenty years old,' concluded Margherita. 'I still remember the ones that were told to me, and even if I've learned that they aren't true, I continue to get pleasure and some comfort from them."

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Kids are not fools...even at 3. They know a fairy tale when they hear one.

I clearly recall the incident when I was just about 3 and playing in our backyard in our Village with my Father. Suddenly a squirrel chasing her nut ran between us. And I was transfixed with her agility and beauty.

Father was watching me and told me how that squirrel got those three lovely stripes on her back. According to him, when the monkey army of Sugriv was carrying boulders and stones to build a bridge across the sea to Sri Lanka for Lord Raam, who was sitting on a stone and watching, this very squirrel got excited and wanted to participate in the holy enterprise and started rolling herself in sand and hurrying to the sea and dumping the sand on her back into the sea, and hurrying back and forth and back and forth, to 'uplift' the seabed.

Watching her, Lord Raam was so pleased with her devotion that He took her up in His arms and, with his three fingers, gently stroked her back. Upon which our backyard squirrel asked Him to make the stripes indelible.

I knew my Father was fibbing.

But 40 years later, when I used to lie down on my cot under the mango tree of our backyard in our Qrs C1-97 at IIT KGP, I used to watch half a dozen squirrels going about their nut-cracking business, and recall my Father's Fairy Tale and exult.

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I have a request to Hrithikjee who I am told started as a child actor.

"Please don't bar your kids Rehaan (5) and Ridhaan (3) from watching Tom & Jerry, the ultimate fairy tale that I watch with Ishani in my lap, both of us transfixed and full of love for the Message, if there is one, of the cartoon."

For himself, whenever he feels unreasonably happy (say thrice a week on the average) in this woebegone world of ours, I recommend Kafka.

As for his quest for 'unhappy endings', there is none: the ultimate cynic, Maugham, wanted to end his Razor's Edge on an unhappy note, but says he found that his protagonists' 'marriage and death' are equally happy: in either case "the interest passes on to the next generation".

And my Guru SDM (May his soul RIP!) proved the existence of an Infinite Grace by citing the instance of pain: "When it is unbearable, the patient faints; if even worse, he dies...the true Hell is one in which pain is endless and there is no fainting or death."

Draupadi curses Ashwathama for killing all her offspring thus:

"May Death Elude You!"; and this is no Fairy Tale...I saw him the other day crying inconsolably and wandering aimlessly in the Himalayas {;-}



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