Dibyendu's WallScript

The burden of man, the burden of the great soul — it knows no bounds. Rabindranath once wrote in his essay The Religion of Man: “Man feels, within and without, that he exists in the Infinite. It is only through conscious and deliberate union with that Infinite that he comes to know himself in truth. In communion with the outer world lies his growth; in communion with the inner world, his fulfillment.”   That immense burden — the burden of being human — is what gives rise to the act of relief. When a lion in the forest attacks a deer, rarely do the other deer rush to save the one under assault. But civilized man alone will run to help another man in distress. Perhaps this is the one profound distinction that sets humankind apart from the rest of creation.   And yet, even this distinction is slowly eroding. There is a Sanskrit proverb: Chakravart Parivartante — everything comes full circle. Primitive instincts, long suppressed, resurface anew. One writer even imagined the man of...

For forty days and forty nights Noah’s ark drifted upon the raging waters of the Great Deluge. God’s intent was to cleanse a sin-laden earth of its corruption. In that terrible calamity, He afflicted all living beings. And yet, in the very moment when humanity seemed on the brink of extinction, God discovered Noah. Only Noah’s family was spared from annihilation. At God’s command, every species upon the earth found at least one representative within Noah’s mighty ark. Thus, amid unimaginable peril, the great multitude of living creatures was preserved.   At last, after forty relentless days of flood, Noah’s ark came to rest upon Mount Ararat. God let light dawn again upon the world. The clouds parted, and the rainbow appeared. God told Noah that He would never again drown the earth. However mythical this Biblical tale may appear, whenever we think of deliverance from disaster, it is Noah who comes first to mind. Though Noah had foreknowledge of the impending deluge, he yet remains ...

Modern men no longer live in the intoxication of heroic delusions. A storyteller once observed: Cervantes’ knight Don Quixote, though not a hero in the real world, behaved in heroic fashion — and for that he had to suffer its terrifying consequences. In truth, whether in the history of world literature or in the dawn of modernity, Cervantes’ Don Quixote stands as the very first human hero. Before Don Quixote, all who bore the mantle of “hero” were either gods themselves or divine messengers sent by heaven. That a mortal man could himself become a hero — this was first proven through the quixotic figure of Cervantes. Yet, there are formidable obstacles barring man’s path to true heroism. First, man can never wield the sorceries or miracles of the godlike super-hero. Second, his actions are often flawed, morally grey, at times downright ungodly, confined within the small circle of his own existence. Third, his nature is not celestial but animalistic in part, prone to instinct and desire....

Ingmar Bergman, now eighty-two, is deeply angered. The patriarch of European cinema, the immortal creator of Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal, Persona, and Cries and Whispers, has turned his fury upon his own country’s filmmakers. For long, Bergman had withdrawn from the screen, vanished into silence. Today he lives in seclusion on the remote Swedish island of Fårö, far away from the bustle of cinema.   Yet even from that lonely island he could not remain indifferent to the current state of European film. With a bitterness that stings, he has compared the business of filmmaking to the trade of butchers and prostitutes. What provoked such a declaration? The creeping importation of pornography and fabricated sexuality into Europe’s mainstream cinema.   Recently, the Stockholm newspaper Expressen published one of Bergman’s strangest dreams. In this dream he saw: “Pernilla August and Lena Endre were sitting by the swimming pool in transparent bathing suits. I swam swiftly towar...

The book in which I find peace of mind and ease of spirit— yes, that book makes me a worm! A bookworm—that is what I call myself. Man may stand a little higher than worm, yet I feel no shame in accepting this epithet. Listen further: I wish to remain a bookworm all my life. In the weariness of civic society, in a life stripped of variety, in the dull monotony of days, in the arrogance of neighbours, in the indifference of nature—who else can bestow meaning upon life, if not books? In the modern world, true friendship is a rare luxury. In the old days, a lonely man sighed, “God is my only friend.” I have changed that saying. For me, book is my only friend. The throne once occupied by God, I have offered to the book. If in some prison, surrounded by walls, a despot were to condemn me to life-long exile, I would not mind—so long as that prison were a vast library.   Yet, in the present context of the world, the place of the book in human life is strangely complicated. On one side i...