BEWARE THE TALE TWISTERS

 There are stories that change the brain and yet there are brains that change stories. There are story tellers and there are story twisters. Stories can be used to enhance understanding of life. In fact they are the best teachers in the world. Sadly though, there are people who strive to make waste even out of the best. My last post on the sad situation of our present day education system which is stifling the natural growth of our children, led me to understand a group of people who promote suicide by romanticising it. An artistic depiction in my post of a child metaphorically described to be a free bird in heaven who desired to come to earth, took a wrong turn with a reader. The line was, ‘Rabindranath Tagore had perhaps envisaged the troubles of this little child long ago when she was probably a tiny free bird flapping her way through heaven wondering if our planet would be a good place to visit. Obviously her choice proved her wrong.’ An intelligent, angry and suffering reader brought it to my knowledge that there are people out there who are made to believe that angels come down to earth and get so dissatisfied down here that they commit suicide to shorten their visit. It may sound dreamy to some but it’s definitely not a pleasant romanticism.

My next thought was regarding the why and the how of the inception of an idea so romantically destructive to be born in the mind of individuals to convince weaker minds to embrace death. My search led me to an interesting story from the Hindu Mythology. In the story, there is Narada, a Vedic sage mentioned in the Puranas who is famous and known in the Hindu traditions as a travelling musician and storyteller. He is the one who is often heard carrying news as well as enlightening wisdom. The story is about a day when this sage happens to hear the gods and the angels in heaven expressing their desire to visit the earth because they feel that their life in heaven is quite boring when in contrast the people of the earth seem to have a lot many things to enjoy. Narada understands that unless they see the reality of the planet, they will not be convinced that their heaven is more peaceful and a better place to be in and so we see the picnic arranged. When the whole lot of foreigners come down to our settlement, they get a shock of their life when they see people conniving to get to one another. The deception, lusts, anger, frustrations, vengeance, hatred and sorrows of the earth people make them realise that we humans are like birds captured in golden cages of wealth and physical comforts and that we have as victims of the fashions of the world, trimmed our wings self-destructively and now are unable to enjoy the most simplistic joys of nature . Sorrowfully and disgustedly they then leave to return to their heaven. 

The gist of the story here is that though the earth has a lot of apparent joyful attractions on it, it also has a lot of self-inflicted as well as people-inflicted pain and sorrow on it. To twist this understanding and make people believe that those who find it difficult to live over here are probably angels or gods from heaven and need not continue to live over here and wouldn’t be wrong to desire to go back to their original home is a manipulative plot of the evil to destroy a lovely life. Life is a gift which must be cherished and worked hard upon to make better every day.

If we are made to believe that suicide will put a stop to any chances of our life getting worse, then we need to also know that while considering suicide, we are shutting all possibilities of our life from getting better.

There is a thin line between truth and fiction. Truth is bare and naked and fiction wears a transparent cloth. The reader of the story therefore has to look deep to see truth through the translucence beauty of the narrative. Creative writings often have psychological symbolism. The descriptions are to be read, not literally but metaphorically. My tiny free bird’s realisation that the earth was not what she had figured out in her mind, was an attempt to understand  it as a place of troubles on it and not just some weekend resort full of fun and frolic. Existence is a full course meal; the presence of bitter gourd on our plate can never however affect the taste of chocolate in our mouth.

Life is beautiful, never think of destroying it. Work on it to make it better each day instead of tearing it down. Live to tell your story and help others.