Blind Faith

A fragile, delicately wrought parable on the limitations of vision and the dark side of love……. A fiction novel by Sagarika Ghose. That is ‘Blind Faith’.

Somewhat akin to God of small things, which I took a year to complete, but could complete this within a day.

When Mia, acutely depressed by the suicide of her father, and compelled by her mother, who is to remarry and move to US, meets Karna, a young Indian guru who seems to have walked straight out of her fathers painting of the Kimbh Mela, she feels compelled to follow him all the way from London to India. At the same time she meets the suave corporate, Vik. She feels that marrying Vik, will help her reach Karna.

In India, Mia hears of Indi, Viks accomplished, inordinately attractive mother, and IAS officer who is now blind, and in Goa, but is not able to meet her. Within a year she is chasing a duplicitous love, she travels to the Kumbh, to the heart of her fathers paintings, where life, she learns allows another perspective….a stunningly beautiful account of lifes distorted perceptions: of reason that blinds, of hate that liberates and of love that strangles.

It says that Families are nothing but traps, they weaken you.

Anger when it comes, is not just a noisy tantrum. Anger focuses the mind, quietness the soul, sharpens the intelligence. Anger bides its time, anger is polite, anger is well-behaved because anger grows into a conviction, a belief and then it starts to find ways to express itself in the most efficient manner.

Revenge need not be impetuous. It can become fanciful and imaginative, reflecting the twists and turns of the growing up years. Revenge is not just a silly bout of crying, revenge plots silently and becomes a reason for survival.

Today thing were changing. Fortunes were being built from mud. A young graduate might set up a computer centre in a mustard field and begin a lucrative outsourcing business to an Ameircan firm headquartered in Memphis. Today’s cooks are tomorrows motel owners in Dubai, and day after’s international tycoons. Fathers may push carts of fresh fruit down the street but they’ll do their damnedest to make sure son is happy.

The absorption of unnatural circumstances is achieved easily by the depressed imagination.

Indi’s story in the parallel, which had shades that of Indira Gandhis, and Mia – Maneka, According to Indi, this mother thing is a terrible trap. Mother is a category without change, without dynamism, without democracy. Everything else can change , the world can change, but mother cannot change. Just mother. Mother Mary, Mother Earth. Pavithra Ashramas motto, Pure love of the mother women!!
When a mother gives birth, she doesn’t know into which undiscovered county her child will lead her.

Perhaps giving birth is indeed dealing out a certain kind of death, perhaps the act of creation carries within it the act of destruction. And only a mother knows this secret.
Middleclass indulges themselves in flabby, comfort seeking ways, as contrasted with the higher principle of pleasure which came from adventures that are close to death. Death was an ideal, while comfort was mediocre and centered around money. The rich and sheltered, need to feel the misery of the poor and unloved.

‘A heightened sense of persecution, the feeling of a cunifromly hostile environment, a focus on coincidences and schemes, is another dangerous sign that the mind is breaking up into delusion and that the patient might require drugs simply to slow down the rate of thought.’

The ability, attitude and the actions, of a rich son Vik, who was brought up with all luxurious, with lots of chocolates, to keep his mouth shut, as you throw a ball far away to keep a dog away when it is disturbing you, and his early death leaving behing two women, mother Indi, and wife Mia…..

Men and women are not they same, and they cannot be, it is difficult to phantom, each other…The female ego is the most destructive force….and Personal liberty is seen as the basis for community improvement….