Jacob Mathews (1983)
Gentle reader, there comes a time in each of our lives when we are confronted with facing reality as it is. I am not talking here about truth, which is a different proposition. As C S Lewis put it in his essay “Myth became fact”: “What flows into you from the myth(story) is not truth but reality (truth is always about something, but reality is that about which truth is)”. What I think Lewis is trying to say is that truth is an abstract mental proposition, whereas reality is the concrete, substantial thing itself. Why am I starting off on this philosophical note? Our term at the editorial board comes to an end with this volume (Kattangal Chimes, Volume 5), and we will be passing on the baton to a new team.
True to our stated objective at the outset, that this magazine must remain for the alumni, of the alumni and by the alumni, we feel that a new team at the helm will give the opportunity for other voices from amongst us to be heard. We continue to be humbled at the feedback we have received from all of you about the first four volumes of KC! Thank you to all who wrote in and to those who contributed. We hope that you will keep sending in your articles and comments and that those who have not yet contributed will hear the call and respond- only this time to a new editorial team!
It has been great fun to be associated with KC and with bringing out these first five volumes. It gave us at the Editorial Board a chance to interact with each other after a gap of around 40 years and we found the interaction to be thoroughly enjoyable and satisfying! Our “Thank you” to K M Subhash for putting this group together!
My elder daughter Sarah is a writer and her first novel, All this could be different, was a finalist for the National Book Awards in 2022. It is a brilliant and poignant novel, and she writes and I quote, “This is not a story about work or precarity. I am trying, late in the evening, to say something about love, which for many of us is not separable from ….” Yes, it is a novel about love and I think that is what our world needs today! If we could love one another and see the good in the other person, I think our world would be a better place. Sometimes in the pursuit of perfection, or just in our general behavior, and with our words, and actions, we are capable of hurting others, without realizing it. I wish I was kinder to people I love and behaved better than I had! However, I can find consolation in words Sarah wrote to me in an e-mail, “Appa, no one is perfect, because perfection is a small and frozen form of idealism, that has no place in the intricate cathedrals of love”.
Permit me, gentle reader, to end, where I started, with C. S Lewis. In his “Weight of Glory”, Lewis writes and I quote: “There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations- these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit- immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is in fact the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously- no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feelings for the sin in spite of which we love the sinner.”
It is my hope and prayer that each one of us increase in our capacity to love our fellow human beings and strive in our own humble ways to try and make this world a better place for ourselves and for our children and grandchildren and generations to follow. Sayonara. Salaam. Adieu.