On Goodness

I personally cannot tolerate the mere insinuation of endorsing goodness, thought I swear by it upon my glass of Coke at cocktail gatherings. I am made to agree that goodness as a virtue was hailed rakish during the Victorian era. One cannot help it; every era is entitled to its excesses. These days there is nothing more unfashionable and moral than having to seek refuge under the facade of some flaccid moral rectitude. The singularly unattractive thing about all men is that they turn good at some point. Why, at times I find myself a pile of miserable rubble of frightful goodness.

Never make the mistake of liaising goodness with innateness. One has to put in ounces of effort to procure the finesse of unwholesome uprightness; goodness is not an inborn trait. It requires to be carefully cultivated and thoroughly acquired; it is an art. Nobody at first likes the asphyxiating cloak of goodness over him. Man is born free and nurses a fancy to remain that way. For a free man there can be nothing more disastrous than the exclusivity of an endearing encumbrance such as goodness. When one is dear, one ceases to be free. Goodness is like a wife. One takes recourse to it when one begins to find almost all of life’s revelries blasé and feels its time for some existential retrospection. A friend of mine philosophised: Goodness is like wine; the longer you are good, the better you become. Whatever he meant by that, I’m sure he must have been mentally repressed with the amount of virtue he saw. While I personally am not quite so sure about it, there is one unsettling trend that has bared its face conspicuously: People, like wine, become more good with age. The finality of the situation is depressing. So much so that the very thought of growing old petrifies me these days.

Really it is either senescence or resignation that drives one to goodness. When people begin to realise that they are capable of little else, they pretend to be good. I knew this bloke who presented quite a picture at the poetry competitions in college. Whenever he took part, he left no stones unturned to ensure he won. He was very thorough with his preparation for the grand event; he lucubrated with huge anthologies for five nights and days. But the buffoon was a sore loser. He could never plagiarise with an appropriate piece. Imagine the judge’s thundering fury when he found verbatim excerpts of The Charge of the Light Brigade. He felt genuinely outraged and flushed to the yellowness of a full fry. He resolved, in a huff, never to come back. He frankly thought it was an insolent travesty of World Peace, the topic. Our hero wore on his sulkiest face and stuck his tongue out pitiably like a drenched poodle. And all the girls who passed by commiserated, “You are such a good poet and such a good person! God repeatedly tests only the good people.” As if God were some foreman in a mechanical unit sequestering out all the rejects. He put on a dejected appearance and trotted behind them wishing he had a tail to wag. And the girls turned back now and then and surreptitiously gushed just loud enough to make themselves heard, “Cho chweet!” And he made it a point to volubly harp on the aphorism: Nice guys finish last. Believe me, there was not an iota of ‘niceness’ in the conniving quibbler. But at the end of the day his non-existent goodness percolated through the tender hearts of the girls.

These genteel ladies are supposed to be ever so shy and romantic. Though they vehemently endorse the stereotype most unconvincingly, they are nothing of the type. A friend of mine was tolerably sane and evil until he saw this damsel. Within the span of a day he somersaulted into a tumbling mass of ungracious virtue and bumptious chivalry. He followed the lady like a Pomeranian pet and put on his best behaviour possible. He flooded her with flowers and other unusably romantic gifts all betokening his steadfast Victorian romance for her. She rejected him because she found him far too sweet and nice and proposed marriage to a guy who looked an injudicious crossbreed of an owl and an Orangutan.

Thankfully the evil in me has never been supplanted by any of its antithetical cousins, despite the various impending threats and hazards. My acquaintance with the perfectly odious virtue has been restricted to that of an observer. Every now and then I see stark Goodness on the streets and end up spurting out irrelevant ejaculations like 'Ada Paavi' or more Pommy indecencies like ‘O Blimey’ or ‘Oopsee Daisies’, wallowing in vicarious self-pity for three seconds and walking on.

- posted by Dileepan @ 3:20:00 am

Lampoons:
Post a Comment