P. G.
Wodehouse once wrote that in order to be happy all a man needs is a Pekinese
dog, a swimming pool at home, and loved
ones far away. Can any cynic beat that? It bears reminding ourselves what
Aristotle really said was that children and teenagers apart (merely because
they cannot feed themselves, nothing more), man is not a ‘social’- but a political animal, who invariably bickers
and fights and even kills whenever he is caught up in large groups, and has
discovered politics as a safety valve to avoid constant and large scale killing of
his fellow men, simply because he can’t put up with them for very long. Otherwise,
he depends on circuses of one sort or another to keep him forgetful of his
plight, whether they be weddings or shopping malls or cricket and football or
casinos or drunken orgies…but those of course, serve only men who do not think.
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3 comments:
Dear sir,
they say 'ignorance is bliss, cherish it' but I can never agree with this because those who say this are living in a concocted heaven, a 'fools paradise'.
Every day I see hundreds of people rushing off to shopping malls and incurring enormous credit card bills and an even higher amount of psychological stress at the end of the month (on top of all that, most things these people buy are useless be it insanely expensive cellphones or deodorants which claim to be able to enhance ones personality and sex appeal), I see my debt ridden state spending millions to felicitate a cricket team which has done nothing more than win a cricket championship, I see people judging the progress of film making in our nation by the kinds of motorbikes used in films, I see hundreds of boys who have absolutely no interest in studies become engineers and doctors. If you ask any of them why they are doing something, they all have they same reason, "everyone else is doing it".this world seems to be rotating on a giant axis of desire and consumption aided by what we Bengalis call 'hujug'.
I see these people and I feel they are all like the ostrich who buries her head in the sand and thinks she is safe from the predator. I see these people and I get nightmares, I feel insecure, will all that is good in this world be sacrificed for light beer and blue jeans?
yours faithfully,
Diptokirti
Dear Diptokirti,
I did not quite see the connection of your comment with the blogpost. And though of course all that you have said is true, I hope you can soothe your conscience with the knowledge that you yourself are above such folly!
Sir
I've been skulking in the shadows and around a tall tree with this rather mysterious or non-mysterious post with the weird connections among the title and the PGW bit and Aristotle. Course if I remember the day right when you put it up - it seems to quite fit right. I see a glinting sort of a writer who's putting on his ogre-like cloak to write this little post.
Now considering the kind of "loved ones" PGW used to mock and laugh at - I think that it's very necessary that those "loved ones" who are neither loveable nor loving stay very, very far away (and stay away even when one is sleeping), and are told to stay off. I'm not sure why one would need a Pekinese dog (of all things) to be happy. Two cats can be nice or three. The swimming pool would be very nice. But that's all one "needs" to be happy...? I would disagree.
He never seemed nor sounded cynical to me though. He simply sounds right. It's all the pretense that he poked and prodded at with his pointed pen.
As for Aristotle's point regarding the 'political animal' - I don't know whether politics is that much of a safety valve (although I wouldn't argue against his point at every point of the way). His argument has certain limitations. I mean what about those political peeps (the MLAs) who were coming in helmets just to argue and debate?...I think some people choose political debates because there is no "social" life to be found that engages the life of the mind and heart and soul.
That explains the circuses and the malls.
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