'The helping hand that guides you along... whether you're right ... whether you're wrong!' ❤️

Peter Pan | Film

On J. M. Barrie | & His Peter Pan

#onhisbirthdaytoday #mothersday

9th May 2025

In honour of Mother’s Day this Sunday (11th May 2025), today, we’ve got for us all a slice of life from J. M, Barrie, and his lovely creation - Peter Pan and his Neverland.

It’s such a sweet coincidence that J. M. Barrie’s birthday and Mother’s Day come so close to each other.

Well, Peter Pan has made such a lasting impact on the entire landscape of children’s literature. In Peter Pan, Barrie moves beyond the moralistic and didactic to weave an engaging story that embraces the worlds of fantasy, imagination and adventure.

In fact, Barrie’s works carry a strong sense of sentimentality in his portrayal of children, exploring themes like loss and longing, and the bliss of childhood!

There is a distinctive element of magical realism as well, that’s the hallmark of Peter Pan – something that makes the extraordinary feel believable, and the mundane magical!

I am sure we all musta sure watched Barrie’s Peter Pan (that was made into a movie - the good ol’ 1953 Disney’d version) who dances and flies around delightfully not only in the movie, but also in our little hearts as well, ain’t he?

Well, Wendy, the eldest girl of the Darling family, who lives in a quiet street, in Bloomsbury, London, gets so excited and delighted when Peter Pan appears at the window of her house one fine night!

And in the course of their animated conversations, when Peter asks her who’s a ‘mother’, she gives him, her delightful definition of a ‘mother’ –

Here goes the conversation between Wendy and Pan, Peter Pan -

Wendy: My name is Wendy, Wendy Moira Angela Darling.

PETER PAN: Wendy’s enough.

Wendy: What were you doing there?

PETER PAN: I came to listen to the stories.

Wendy: My stories? But they’re all about you.

PETER PAN: Of course. That’s why I like ‘em. I tell ‘em to the Lost Boys.

Wendy: I'm so glad you came back tonight. I might never have seen you.

PETER PAN: Why?

Wendy: Because I have to grow up tomorrow.

PETER PAN: Grow up?

Wendy: Tonight’s my last night in the nursery.

PETER PAN: But that means no more stories.

Wendy: (SNIFFLING) Mm-Hmm

PETER PAN: No! I won’t have it! Come on.

Wendy: But where are we going?

PETER PAN: To Never Land.

Wendy: Never Land!

PETER PAN: You’ll never grow up there.

Wendy: Oh, Peter, it would be so wonderful. But wait! What would mother say?

PETER PAN: Mother? What’s a mother?

Wendy: Why, Peter, a mother’s someone… who loves and cares for you and tells you stories –

PETER PAN: Good! You can be our mother. Come on.

And towards the end of their wondrous adventures in Neverland, Wendy yet again bespeaks to the grandeur of a mother!

When Wendy tells them all that they’ve to get back home to London, the boys are quite unhappy!

Wendy then gives them a beautiful discourse on a ‘mother’, to everyone who’s eagerly gathered around her, a sweet little discourse that’s iced with a wonderful song too!

[And when Wendy sings them all the song, even the inimical Pirate captain and his men who are eavesdropping on their conversation, are so moved to sobs and tears as she sings the song!]

Giving y’all the conversation sequence that leads up to the song -

Here goes -

Wendy: Oh for goodness sake. Please, boys. Do you want to stay here and grow up like - like savages?

Michael: Of course.

Wendy: But you can’t. you need a mother. We all do.

Michael: Aren’t you our mother, Wendy?

Wendy: Why, Michael, of course, not! Surely you haven’t forgotten our real mother.

Michael: Did she have silky ears and wear a fur coat?

Wendy: Oh no, Michael. That was Nana.

Lost Boys: I think I had a mother once. What was she like? What was she like? I forget. I had a white rat. That’s no mother!

Wendy: No, no, boys. Please. I’ll tell you what a mother is.

Lost Boys: Yeah tell us. Tell us. Please Wendy.

Wendy: Well, a mother, a real mother is the most wonderful person in the world. She’s the angel voice... that bids you good night, kisses you cheek, whispers ’sleep tight’.

Your mother and mine

your mother and mine

the helping hand that guides you along

whether you're right

whether you're wrong!

Your mother and mine

your mother and mine

what makes mothers

all that they are

might as well ask what makes a star!

Ask your heart

to tell you her worth

your heart will say

Heaven on Earth

another word for divine

your mother and mine!

John: I propose we leave for home at once.

Lost Boys: Could I go too, Wendy? Me too, Wendy! I wanna go!

Wendy: All right boys. All right. I’m sure mother would be glad to have you. Uh, that is, if Peter doesn’t mind.

Happy Mother’s Day folks!

One flipped a flat rock and yelled, ‘SNAKE!’ We crowded around, and they pounded it to death with stones, screaming, ‘Kill it, it’s poisonous!’

Snakes, Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll | A Memoir

[By the Founder of Chennai’s Famous Snake Park & Crocodile Park Trust]

Rom a.k.a Romulus Whitaker

Well, I’ve just finished reading his inspiring memoir titled, Snakes, Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll: My Early Years that he had co-authored with Janaki Lenin, and published by HarperCollins this year [2024].

Just giving us all, excerpts from his book, before we get to know more about him towards the end of this post. 

So here goes -

Mummy started me fishing when I was about four years old. She rigged a long straight stick with a length of string and a bent pin. I collected worms by turning over rocks in the yard and kept them in a jelly jar half full of soil.

I dropped the bait into the water and waited.

A sharp tug startled me. With a swirl, a fish almost took the stick out of my hand. I hauled with all my strength and flipped a struggling yellow perch on to the grassy bank next to the log. 

Before it could wriggle back into the stream, I dove on it, and the spines on its dorsal fin pierced my hands. Wiping the drops of blood on my shorts and ignoring the pain, I carried the fish home.

Hooking that fish set me on a lifelong obsession, which included catching barramundi in New Guinea, mahseer in the Himalayas, largemouth bass in the Everglades and channel catfish in the Mississippi River, to name a few.

My friends had small fishing rods, which were much better than my home-made one. One let me borrow a hook, which made fishing easier. I coaxed Mummy into buying me a proper fishing rod. This was when a decisive incident set me on my course as a snake missionary.

We rolled over rocks to find earthworms, what my buddies called ‘angleworms’, for fish bait.

One flipped a flat rock and yelled, ‘SNAKE!’ We crowded around, and they pounded it to death with stones, screaming, ‘Kill it, it’s poisonous!’ I didn’t stop them, nor did I join in.

Not having seen one before, I was fascinated but afraid.

After the boys stepped back, I squatted near the battered creature and examined it. I carried it home on the end of a stick against their advice. Mummy and Gail were in the kitchen when I walked in.

‘The poor thing!’ Gail exclaimed. ‘It’s a harmless garter snake, Breezy,’ Mummy said.

‘It wouldn’t have hurt you.’ ‘I didn’t kill it, Mummy. The other kids did.’

‘Promise me you won’t kill a snake,’ she said. I readily did.

Perhaps this was when I became fixated on the reptiles and vowed to be their champion. After that episode, I took to turning over every stone—not for earthworms but for snakes. When I found one, I took it home alive in the jelly jar.

‘It’s a milksnake,’ Mummy said.

She took a photograph of a four-year-old me holding it, recording the event for posterity. As cold spring merged into warm summer, I caught gorgeously patterned milksnakes that the village kids called checkered adders, tiny delicate ring-necked snakes, Dekay’s snakes, sleek and fast ribbon snakes, and garter snakes.

I tried different handling techniques, eventually learning to move one hand over the other as the snake slithered. The excited ones shat and musked on my hands, and each species had a distinctive odour. For instance, garter snakes stank worse than skunks, but milksnakes weren’t so bad.

I also got bitten a lot, making the local boys react, ‘You’re gonna die. You’re a goner. Just wait and see! A checkered adder bite’ll kill you in an hour.’

Mummy bought Snakes of the World by Raymond L. Ditmars, who later became one of my heroes. Of course, I couldn’t read it by myself.

She read aloud the chapter titled ‘The New World Harmless Snakes’ several times.

Before long, I had memorized their names and every detail about these creatures’ habits and temperaments.

Mummy helped me convert an old aquarium into a terrarium in which to keep snakes as pets. To feed them, I caught grasshoppers and small frogs in the fields.

Another time, I found a shed snakeskin under a rock. Back at home, I examined it with my plastic magnifying glass. The skin was inside out. ‘Mummy, snakes shed their skins the way we take our socks off,’ I announced my discovery.

The eye of the snake was covered by a single rounded lens of skin. Everything about them was so wonderfully different. I made out faint long lines down the back. A garter snake.

As her parents had encouraged Violet, Ma reinforced my curiosity. Everyone expected I’d outgrow snakes. As a teenager, I became enamoured of motorbikes, but my interest in snakes didn’t wane.

As long as I can remember, snakes have been the focus of my fascination and love.

I was so lucky to grow up in the northern New York countryside, where harmless snakes were common. The wilds of the Kodaikanal hills in south India, nurtured that love to an obsession during my schoolboy years.

Many conservation pioneers started their careers as ardent hunters, a phenomenon captured in the 1978 book The Penitent Butchers by Richard Fitter and Sir Peter Scott.

As a high school student, I killed and skinned birds for a museum collection, which put me on the fringes of scientific research.

For a year after I graduated, what people call a ‘gap year’ these days, I shot spotted deer and blackbuck to eat, stalked a marauding leopard and guarded crops from elephants. In Wyoming, I spent more time hunting and fishing than getting a college education.

You may wonder how a boy who grew up loving snakes could exploit them. It’s for that reason this is not a memoir, but an autobiography.

If I were to cleave to the single track of how I am viewed—a reptile conservationist, educator and researcher—a lot of back story would be missing. In an autobiography, authors are caught between extolling their virtues and achievements, and camouflaging their raging egos.

It would be dishonest to chronicle the awards and applause, and airbrush my bloodthirsty past off the record. The simple thing to do would be to leave out these inconvenient parts as they are not acceptable activities for a conservationist today.

That way I’d escape the criticism that’s sure to come. By revealing my bloody hands and early love of destruction, whether it be of animal life or explosives, you, the reader, can see the real me with all the warts.

I make no apologies, since I don’t view myself as a conservationist— that’s a label others have bestowed upon me.

I’ve always done what I loved, whether fishing, hunting, catching snakes or championing the cause of habitat protection and protecting snakes,

writes Romulus Whitaker, the famous 81-year old herpetologist, and the man renowned for establishing the Madras Snake Park, the Madras Crocodile Bank Trust and the Andaman and Nicobar Environmental Team, as well as for his work conserving India’s rainforests - the habitat of so many endangered species.

Interestingly, the idea of the park was conceived to rehabilitate the Irula tribe, who are known for their expertise in catching snakes. Well, the tribals of the Irula tribe went jobless after the government had announced a ban on snake trading.

It was Whitaker who helped the Irula tribe to get involved in extracting snake venom used for the production of antivenom drugs.

"I had never met anyone like her. I had dated other girls before, some serious, some not. But Usha occupied an entirely different emotional universe"

Usha Vance and her Academic Prowess! 

On the Second Lady (designate) of the USA

JD Vance on his Wife Usha in his Memoir HillBilly Elegy

Today we had hosted a senior American Professor from the University of Houston – Robin E Gearing, who has more than a hundred research papers in SCOPUS/WoS to his credit, and has been quite a regular visiting faculty to MCC for the past six years now.

This afternoon, when he joined us for lunch – I was asking him if he found Indian food good on his palate. He was pausing a bit for an answer – and he then hastened to give me a reply – profusely apologizing for his delayed reply!

Said he, ‘I was busy glued to my mobile phone, looking up the latest on the US Election Results. Trump seems to be leading’ he said.

Well, the Trump win may have raised both positive and not-so-positive comments from the media - here in India and across the Atlantic as well!

But my post today, on our blog here, would focus on Trump’s running mate – J D Vance and his Indian-origin wife Usha Vance. Interestingly, Vance will be the youngest VP to assume office since 1953’s Richard Nixon!

And what interested me the most was the media attention given to Usha Vance and her Indian roots. Was so happy to know about that!

Especially about her academic prowess!

I was so happy to read that, Usha Vance has a great-aunt aged 96, named Chilukuri Santhamma, back here in India, who is celebrated as the nation’s oldest active professor, who – even today – travels around 60 kilometres each day, to her University to teach Physics.

Usha’s parents had moved to the United States way back in the 1970s, and they teach molecular biology and engineering in San Diego. Earlier, both her father and grandfather had studied and later taught at India’s premier Indian Institute of Technology.

Quite interestingly, I chanced upon her husband and Vice-President designate J D Vance’s memoir.

Yes, he had written his memoir titled, Hillbilly Elegy – ‘a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis’ - that of white working-class Americans!

Remarkable that he had written his memoir when he was just 31 years of age!!!

In this memoir he introduces to his readers, his wife Usha Vance as a ‘supersmart daughter of Indian immigrants’.

Usha comes into the picture for the first time in Chapter 13 of this memoir.

Here goes his lovely words on his Usha -

As I began to think a bit more deeply about my own identity, I fell hard for a classmate of mine named Usha.

As luck would have it, we were assigned as partners for our first major writing assignment, so we spent a lot of time during that first year getting to know each other.

She seemed some sort of genetic anomaly, a combination of every positive quality a human being should have: bright, hardworking, tall, and beautiful. I joked with a buddy that if she had possessed a terrible personality, she would have made an excellent heroine in an Ayn Rand novel, but she had a great sense of humor and an extraordinarily direct way of speaking.

Where others might have asked meekly, “Yeah, maybe you could rephrase this?” or “Have you thought about this other idea?” Usha would say simply: “I think this sentence needs work” or “This is a pretty terrible argument.”

At a bar, she looked up at a mutual friend of ours and said, without a hint of irony, “You have a very small head.”

I had never met anyone like her. I had dated other girls before, some serious, some not. But Usha occupied an entirely different emotional universe.

I thought about her constantly. One friend described me as “heartsick” and another told me he had never seen me like this.

Toward the end of our first year, I learned that Usha was single, and I immediately asked her out. After a few weeks of flirtations and a single date, I told her that I was in love with her. It violated every rule of modern dating I’d learned as a young man, but I didn’t care.

Usha was like my Yale spirit guide. She’d attended the university for college, too, and knew all of the best coffee shops and places to eat. Her knowledge went much deeper, however: She instinctively understood the questions I didn’t even know to ask, and she always encouraged me to seek opportunities that I didn’t know existed.

“Go to office hours,” she’d tell me. “Professors here like to engage with students. It’s part of the experience here.” In a place that always seemed a little foreign, Usha’s presence made me feel at home.

But there were signs that things weren’t going so well, particularly in my relationship with Usha.

We’d been dating for only a few months when she stumbled upon an analogy that described me perfectly.

I was, she said, a turtle. “Whenever something bad happens—even a hint of disagreement—you withdraw completely. It’s like you have a shell that you hide in.”

It was true.

I had no idea how to deal with relationship problems, so I chose not to deal with them at all. I could scream at her when she did something I didn’t like, but that seemed mean. Or I could withdraw and get away.

Those were the proverbial arrows in my quiver, and I had nothing else. The thought of fighting with her reduced me to a morass of the qualities I thought I hadn’t inherited from my family: stress, sadness, fear, anxiety. It was all there, and it was intense.

So I tried to get away, but Usha wouldn’t let me. I tried to break everything off multiple times, but she told me that was stupid unless I didn’t care about her. So I’d scream and I’d yell. I’d do all of the hateful things that my mother had done. And then I’d feel guilty and desperately afraid. For so much of my life, I’d made Mom out to be a kind of villain. And now I was acting like her. Nothing compares to the fear that you’re becoming the monster in your closet.

I was near Ford’s Theatre, the historic location where John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham in the head. I turned the corner, and after a few steps I saw Usha sitting on the steps of Ford’s Theatre.

She had run after me, worried about me being alone. I realized then that I had a problem—that I must confront whatever it was that had, for generations, caused those in my family to hurt those whom they loved.

I apologized profusely to Usha. I expected her to tell me to go fuck myself, that it would take days to make up for what I’d done, that I was a terrible person.

A sincere apology is a surrender, and when someone surrenders, you go in for the kill. But Usha wasn’t interested in that.

She calmly told me through her tears that it was never acceptable to run away, that she was worried, and that I had to learn how to talk to her. And then she gave me a hug and told me that she accepted my apology and was glad I was okay.

That was the end of it.

And the endearing saga goes on and on. Do grab yourself a copy of Hillbilly Elegy rightaway!

And here’s wishing JD Vance and Usha Vance a remarkable stint at the White House grounds, as Second Gentleman (SGOTUS) and Second Lady (SLOTUS) of the US.

PS: For those of you into binge-watching - on Netflix, there’s news for you on the Vances. Hillbilly Elegy, is streaming now on Netflix. It’s an American drama film [directed by Ron Howard from a screenplay by Vanessa Taylor] based on JD Vance’s 2016 memoir! Here’s wishing you happy watching!

The Turtle Episode | A Screengrab from the Netflix film

Photo courtesy: ClevelandDotCom

The 'Art' of Creative Resistance in 'Everyday Life' ❤️

‘Place’ vs ‘Space’ | The Act and Art of Creative Resistance

Certeau & the ‘Everyday Life’

#reflections #musings

Just around three days ago, on 15th September 2023, I chanced upon an insightful article in the Editorial page of Thamizh Thisai, [the Tamil Edition of The Hindu.]

The article was written by Prof. Rajan Kurai Krishnan.

[On an aside, Prof. Rajan Kurai Krishnan was awarded his PhD in Anthropology by Columbia University, New York in 2009 for his thesis on Tamil Cinema titled “Cultures of Indices: Anthropology of Tamil and Other Cinemas”].

Says Rajan –

Do you think a theoretical book, or a book of insightful contemplations can be written in a poetic style?

Then, you should read for yourself Michel de Certeau’s 1984 book titled, Practice of Everyday Life.

Prof. Rajan then compares Certeau’s writing style to Walter Benjamin’s!

And although Certeau is renowned for his scholarship in Psychology, Philosophy and History across various Universities in America and in Paris, his fame rests predominantly on this book titled, Practice of Everyday Life and his profound thoughts on the ‘everyday’, says Rajan.

Indeed, Certeau is much popular amongst students of literature, especially those of us who specialize in Cultural Studies.

His profound and engaging takes on the ‘Poaching Reader’ or the ‘Reader as Poacher’ is quite popular amongst ‘Reader Response’ devotees as well.

You may want to read more on Certeau’s take on the ‘Reader as Poacher’ on our past post HERE.

Coming back, Certeau in this book, does a profound study on the routine practices or the ‘arts of doing’, such as Reading, Talking, Dwelling, Cooking, etc..

To Certeau, then, as with Cultural Studies, human beings and their ‘cultural practices’ become a profound subject of study.

Grounding his concepts on Foucault, and at the same time, moving away from the Foucauldian, Certeau observes that, in the dichotomy between producers and consumers, (a very common dichotomy in Cultural Studies), the producers (the powerful) are the ones who ‘produce’ the infrastructure of culture – by being the ‘authors’ of literature, science, law, cityscapes, etc), and the users (he prefers the word ‘user’ to ‘consumer’) creatively manipulate, alter, poach, and transform those infrastructures by appropriating them and internalising them.

The process of ‘Consumption’ hence becomes a creative process, a ‘silent production’, which is again a form of resistance, or in Certeau’s words, ‘Creative Resistance’.

If then, for example, Power has the potential to ‘create’ a place (infrastructure), the creative artist – or say, the story teller creates a beautifully crafted ‘space’ within the bounds of ‘place’ which itself strategically acts as means of creative resistance to the power centres.

Says Certeau –

“Renters make comparable changes in an apartment they furnish with their acts and memories; as do speakers, in the language into which they insert both the messages of their native tongue and, through their accent, through their own “turns of phrase,” etc., their own history; as do pedestrians, in the streets they fill with the forests of their desires and goals.”

Interestingly, he calls it the ‘Space of Enunciation!’ as well!

Rings a bell, ain’t it? 😊 

PS: You may want to read our past post on Certeau’s conceptualisation of the ‘Reader as Poacher’ HERE!

“Do you want to know what my secret is?” ❤️

On a Philosophical High | from Huxley ❤️

#onhisbirthdaytoday

Well, whenever students ask us, ‘Why do you think we should read the great philosophers of the past?’,

we gently tell them –

Well, that’s because, the great sages and philosophers of the past, help us obtain for ourselves a better life, a better approach to people, and a better engagement with society!

Most of us simply go through our everyday routine in sync with Nietzsche’s Idea of Eternal Recurrence, 

“to crave nothing more fervently than the infinite repetition, without alteration, of each and every moment!”

Indeed, what else can we do, when, ‘time’s winged chariot’ is catching up on us with such fervour and zeal? 😊

One reason, why it’s become difficult for us to ‘step aside’, and to indulge ourselves in bracketing!

Again, bracketing (or epoche) is Husserl’s term for ‘stepping aside’ from the everyday, commonplace way of seeing things!

In fact, most people live through their sweet lives without questioning what they believe.

That’s where Philosophy steps in, and says,

‘Hey, you there... could you just stop for a moment, and take a closer look at your life and worldviews?’

One such philosopher who makes us ‘pause’ on our routine pathways, and make us take a closer look at our life and worldviews, is Aldous Huxley.

“Aldous Huxley, novelist, essayist, mystic, wrote with the force of a Swift and the bite of a Voltaire”, says the blurb to his book titled, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, published in 1952.

Any faint echoes of the Bard, here? 😊

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

(from Macbeth, spoken by Macbeth)

Interestingly, the book Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow was published in England as Adonis and the Alphabet.

By the way, Huxley and J. Krishnamurti, had a great mutual admiration for each other, ever since they first met in California in early 1938! So yes, reading both these great minds simultaneously is a treat in itself.

So here we go - 😊

In fact, reading through Huxley’s foreword to J. Krishnamurti’s book titled, The First and Last Freedom, leads one to a lot of wonderful, philosophical speculations and literary ruminations as well!

How much the humanist in Huxley anticipates the postmodernists, is anybody’s guess!

A cursory reading through his amazing foreword to J.K’s book, is ample validation to this credo.

‘A lie can be extended, propounded and repeated, but not truth; and when you repeat truth, it ceases to be truth,’

says Huxley in his Foreword to Krishnamurti’s book!

How much we are here, reminded of Adolf Hitler’s controversial maxim where he says,

‘Make the lie big, keep it simple, keep saying it and eventually they will believe it’!

True lies!

All Organized Beliefs are based on Separation!

“Belief inevitably separates. If you have a belief, or when you seek security in your particular belief, you become separated from those who seek security in some other form of belief. All organized beliefs are based on separation, though they may preach brotherhood,” 

he adds.

We Approach the Crisis of our times with ‘formulas’!

We approach the crisis of our times, not with love and insight, but “with formulas, with systems” - and pretty poor formulas and systems at that. But men of good will should not have formulas; for formulas lead, inevitably, only to ‘blind thinking’.

Symbols should never be raised to the rank of dogmas!

We are brought up as believing and practising members of some organization - the Communist or the Christian, the Moslem, the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Freudian.

Consequently you respond to the challenge, which is always new, according to an old pattern; and therefore your response has no corresponding validity, newness, freshness.

If you respond as a Catholic or a Communist, you are responding - are you not? - according to a patterned thought.

Therefore your response has no significance.

Therefore what ‘one has to do, in order to meet the new challenge, is to strip oneself completely, denude oneself entirely of the background and meet the challenge anew’.

Where there is Judgement, Openness of mind is absent!

‘Judge not that ye be not judged.’

The gospel precept applies to our dealings with ourselves no less than to our dealings with others.

Where there is judgement, where there is comparison and condemnation, openness of mind is absent; there can be no freedom from the tyranny of symbols and systems, no escape from the past and the environment.

There is a transcendent spontaneity of life, a ‘creative Reality’, as Krishnamurti calls it, which reveals itself as immanent only when the perceiver’s mind is in a state of ‘alert passivity’, of ‘choiceless awareness’.

And that’s one reason why Jidduji, during one of his discourses, suddenly, stops midway through his talk, and asks this question,

“Do you want to know what my secret is?”

Jim Dreaver, who was part of the audience, says, Krishnamurti rarely ever talked about himself or his own process, and now he was about to give us his secret! There was a silence.

Then he said in a soft, almost shy voice,

“You see, I don’t mind what happens.”

The secret to true happiness, ain’t it?

Coming back to Huxley -

Huxley’s opening lines in the foreword are a treat to those of us who dabble in theory!

Here goes –

Without Symbol-systems we should be Animals!

Man is an amphibian who lives simultaneously in two worlds - the given and the homemade, the world of matter, life and consciousness and the world of symbols.

In our thinking we make use of a great variety of symbol-systems - linguistic, mathematical, pictorial, musical, ritualistic.

Without such symbol-systems we should have no art, no science, no law, no philosophy, not so much as the rudiments of civilization: in other words, we should be animals.

Well, Huxley’s foreword is not only an eye-opener to all and sundry, but also a sagely advice from Vedantist Huxley who takes his readers into realities that are beyond the generally accepted ‘five senses!’

All captions are this blogger’s!

All textual quotations are from JK’s The First and Last Freedom

Templates design: this blogger’s as well! 😊

'A Blow with a Word strikes deeper than a Blow with a Sword'

A. J. Cronin | The Citadel

A Medical Novel that Heralded a Revolution!

#onhisbirthdaytoday

Cronin - A conscientious medical doctor who had the boldness and courage to relinquish his surgeon’s call, and opted to become a writer instead, when he perceived ‘something rotten’ in the affairs of the medical fraternity!

The Citadel, his revolutionary anti-establishmentarian novel, was published in 1937, to an astonishing reception from the reading public, selling millions of copies in a short span of time.  Interestingly, an opinion poll in 1938, voted The Citadel as the most influential book, next in line to the Bible.

A book that heralded the formation of Britain’s National Health Service, ten years later. 

Even today, many medical doctors have testified to the influence of The Citadel, for them to take up medicine as their vocation.

Such is the power of Cronin’s revolutionary pen against the medical establishment of his day. 

“A blow with a word strikes deeper than a blow with a sword,” said Robert Burton, in his The Anatomy of Melancholy, a medical text book, published in the year 1621, and republished any many times thence on! 

Fine-tuning on it still further, Edward Bulwer-Lytton famously said that “The pen is mightier than the sword,” in his 1839 historical play titled, Richelieu: Or the Conspiracy.

Such has been the power of the pen over and above the sword, across the ages!

And when a physician writes something that’s gotta be candid about his own profession, and strongly advocates an ethical code that would govern medical doctors and the medical profession alike, how much more powerful and how much more mightier that pen could really be, is, well, anybody’s guess! 

That’s A. J. Cronin for us all, who like A. P. Chekhov, is quite an amazing physician-turned-writer whose writings have rattled and baffled the medical fraternity all over!

The reasons are not far to seek!

Well, Cronin is one amongst a chosen few conscientious physicians who weaves social criticism with realism and romance!

His experience as a doctor practising amongst the coal-mining communities in South Wales, helped him immensely, in getting a first-hand account of the health problems faced by miners and their occupational health hazards. 

Later on, he was also elevated as the Medical Inspector of Mines for Great Britain. 

Cronin thus heavily drew on his experience as a doctor when he wrote his novels. The Citadel is a case in point.

The Citadel, published in the year 1937, proved an immense hit with the masses as it exposed the arbitrary, atrocious medical ethics of the medical doctors during his days. 

Well, on an aside, the NHS restricts medical doctors from minting money from the mini purses of its pavapetta patients, because the entire health care system was, from thence on, funded by the government, with the Department of Health and Social Care, overseeing the administration of the funding. 

The NHS then, seeks to provide free healthcare to all legal residents of England!

In short, quality health care at almost no expense for the patient, became a possibility in Great Britain, just because of the visionary power of Cronin’s pen! 

Coming back to Citadel! 

Well, the novel deals with a doctor by name Andrew Manson, an idealistic, efficient and newly qualified doctor who takes up duty as an assistant doctor to Dr. Page, in quite unhygienic conditions all around him in a remote mining village. 

Determined to improve the living conditions as well as the health conditions of his patients, who were chiefly miners, Dr. Manson researches much on his specialized area of lung disease. Soon his research gets recognized and he gets elevated to the Mines Fatigue Board in London. 

But eventually he soon resigns and sets up private medical practice where his ‘business’ booms out of proportion!

The lure of easy money traps his conscience into a darky cage, and he is soon on a roll, wading into the wallets of his wealthy patients from thence on!

No spoilers for y’all, though!

But giving y’all dear readers, an excerpt that speaks to some little shocks you might not have otherwise heard or seen or read about, on medical doctors and their tryst with surgery!

Just an excerpt –

Wait! Horror alert! Read on, only if you have a heart that can read through a botched up surgery! 

Excerpts from the novel Citadel, pages 284 to 287!

Realisation broke on Andrew in a blinding flash. He thought: God Almighty! He can’t operate, he can’t operate at all.

The anaesthetist, with his finger on the carotid, murmured in a gentle, apologetic voice:

‘I’m afraid – he seems to be going, Ivory.’

Ivory, relinquishing the clamp, stuffed the belly cavity full of blooded gauze. He began to suture up his great incision. There was no swelling now. Vidler’s stomach had a caved-in, pallid, an empty look, the reason being that Vidler was dead.

‘Yes, he’s gone now,’ said the anaesthetist finally.

Ivory put in his last stitch, clipped it methodically and turned to the instrument tray to lay down his scissors. 

Paralysed, Andrew could not move. Miss Buxton, with a clay coloured face, was automatically packing the hot bottles outside the blanket. By great force of will she seemed to collect herself. She went outside.

The porter, unaware of what had happened, brought in the stretcher. Another minute and Harry Vidler’s body was being carried upstairs to his bedroom.

Ivory spoke at last.

‘Very unfortunate,’ he said in his collected voice as he stripped off his gown.

‘I imagine it was shock – don’t you think so, Gray?’

Gray, the anaesthetist, mumbled an answer. He was busy packing up his apparatus.

Still Andrew could not speak. Amidst the dazed welter of his emotion he suddenly remembered Mrs Vidler, waiting downstairs. It seemed as if Ivory read that thought. He said:

‘Don’t worry, Manson. I’ll attend to the little woman. Come. I’ll get it over for you now.’

Instinctively, like a man unable to resist, Andrew found himself following Ivory down the stairs to the waiting-room. He was still stunned, weak with nausea, wholly incapable of telling Mrs Vidler. It was Ivory who rose to the occasion, rose almost to the heights.

‘My dear lady,’ he said, compassionate and upstanding, placing his hand gently on her shoulder, ‘I’m afraid – I’m afraid we have bad news for you.’

She clasped her hands, in worn brown kid gloves, together. Terror and entreaty were mingled in her eyes.

‘What!’

‘Your poor husband, Mrs Vidler, in spite of everything which we could do for him –’

She collapsed into the chair, her face ashen, her gloved hands still working together.

‘Harry!’ she whispered in a heartrending voice. Then again, ‘Harry!’

‘I can only assure you,’ Ivory went on, sadly, ‘on behalf of Doctor Manson, Doctor Gray, Miss Buxton and myself that no power on earth could have saved him. And even if he had survived the operation –’ He shrugged his shoulders significantly.

She looked up at him, sensing his meaning, aware even at this frightful moment of his condescension, his goodness to her.

‘That’s the kindest thing you could have told me, doctor.’ She spoke through her tears.

‘I’ll send sister down to you. Do your best to bear up. And thank you, thank you for your courage.’

He went out of the room and once again Andrew went with him. At the end of the hall was the empty office, the door of which stood open. Feeling for his cigarette-case, Ivory walked into the office. There he lit a cigarette and took a long pull at it. His face was perhaps a trifle paler than usual but his jaw was firm, his hand steady, his nerve absolutely unshaken.

‘Well, that’s over,’ he reflected coolly. ‘I’m sorry, Manson. I didn’t dream that cyst was haemorrhagic. But these things happen in the best regulated circles, you know.’

‘Of course,’ Ivory inspected the end of his cigarette. ‘He didn’t die on the table. I finished before that – which makes it all right. No necessity for an inquest.’

Andrew raised his head. He was trembling, infuriated by the consciousness of his own weakness in this awful situation which Ivory had sustained with such cold-blooded nerve. He said, in a kind of frenzy: ‘For Christ’s sake stop talking. You know you killed him. You’re not a surgeon. You never were – you never will be a surgeon. You’re the worst botcher I’ve ever seen in all my life.’

There was a silence. Ivory gave Andrew a pale hard glance. ‘I don’t recommend that line of talk, Manson.’

‘You don’t.’ A painful hysterical sob shook Andrew. ‘I know you don’t! But it’s the truth. All the cases I’ve given you up till now have been child’s play. But this – the first real case we’ve had – Oh, God! I should have known – I’m just as bad as you –’

‘Pull yourself together, you hysterical fool. You’ll be heard.’

‘What if I am?’ Another weak burst of anger seized Andrew. He choked: ‘You know it’s the truth as well as I do. You bungled so much – it was almost murder!’

It was a sultry night. He suffered abominably but still he went on, half to torture himself and half in empty deadness because he could not stop. 

As he passed backwards and forwards in a daze of pain he kept asking himself: Where am I going? Where, in the name of God, am I going?

On and on he went, marking the book, a cross for a visit, a circle for consultation, marking the total of his iniquity. 

When it was finished she asked, in a voice whose wincing satire he only then observed:

‘Well! How much to-day?’

He did not, could not, answer. She left the room. He heard her go upstairs to her room, heard the quiet sound of her closing the door. 

He was alone: dry, stricken, bemused. Where am I going? Where in the name of God am I going?

Suddenly his eyes fell upon the tobacco sack, full of money, bulging with his cash takings for the day. 

Another wave of hysteria swept over him. He took up the bag and flung it into the corner of the room. It fell with a dull and senseless sound.

He jumped up. He was stifling, he could not breathe. Leaving the consulting room he rushed into the little back yard of the house, a small well of darkness beneath the stars. Here he leaned weakly against the brick dividing wall. He began; violently, to retch.

*****

Well, it's time to thank Cronin, by remembering this mighty brave heart on his birthday today for having the guts to cleanse the rut and the rot that has been thus far ‘plaguing’ the medical profession beyond redemption, and thus having helped much in making most of the health services free of cost or affordably priced in Great Britain.

The pen is indeed mightier than the sword, ain’t it?