Why doesn’t mother Mary come to us?
Everybody in India is truly high on spirituality, thank God not so literally, so Ms Roy’s latest novel and its title do not surprise me. I wonder what she means by meeting her religious mentor and idle character, but it is quite clear that she means her own mother whom she really idolizes most dotingly.
But seriously, as a spiritual aspirant should you want and wait for some other worldly creature to come and bless you almost ethereally? The answer is a resounding denial, as most of us spiritual people can make out real from what is actually just very clever marketing or even a collective delusion quite honestly.
I am so damn glad that Mother Mary did not choose to come and haunt me almost like a menacing hallucination borne out of the sheer imagination and delusion of my own mental undoing.
It is not so shocking to realise that Ms Roy’s novel describes the mindset of a previously unhinged and free mentality that has now become entrapped and entwined within what is actually her own imperialist and mostly conformist reality.
Every rational Indian then supports being moral and spiritual but not so at the cost of his or her own sanity. One wonders then that what may be true to the author may not apply to the truth of the remaining so many.
The Liberal Left in India is being slammed almost mercilessly, and Ms Roy does nothing to help herself or even care to keep away from meddling in affairs that are too unbecoming. She is known to support the Maoists of the North East and also the Naxalites, a trait that doesn’t necessarily sit too well with the educated elite of the country all so unfortunately.
It goes without saying that I am not going to buy and read the book- I would most certainly stick to my own Hindu texts and religious moorings most desirably.
As is the practice in India mostly, nearly every international event is always connected to the US somehow or the other ever so dramatically. So, will her book win the Booker or the Pulitzer or any other dazzling international decree; why, only time will tell, let’s just hope and pray and wish the best for her blooming ingenuity- a practice that is not the norm with the rest of us in a mostly troubled nationality.
