The Critique

This was an essay I penned for the final exam of English in Divyadaan. Read on… Divyadaan is a place that stands on the two pillars of study and prayer. The aim of the place is to sharpen and develop the fertile minds of the young seminarians, Salesians in particular. The journey to Divyadaan is pretty much pre-established for the Salesians belonging to the Mumbai and Panjim provinces. I belong to the Panjim province and so had no choice but to move here after completing the novitiate. I remember asking my Rector when I was in the aspirantate, the purpose of these three years of study post-novitiate. He told me that it’s a time to broaden my outlook, sharpen my intellect, develop critical abilities and expose myself to new experiences. Looking back on these three years I’ve spent here in Divyadaan, I feel that all those things my Rector told me should happen have happened. I have broadened my outlook by being exposed to a diversity of philosophers and philosophies; I’ve kept ...

Homily for the Third Sunday of Easter preached by Father Felix Fernandes sdb at Don Bosco Church, Nashik, 10 th April 2016. Father began by recounting briefly the life of Bishop Oscar Romero. He hailed from El Salvador and lived and died about 50 years ago. His country was afflicted by systemic poverty and ruled by the military junta. Bishop Romero challenged the government and confronted the soldiers with the words, “You need to follow the voice of God and your conscience and not of military leaders.” Drawing on the words of the Venerable Bishop father pointed out that the question we need to ask is: whose voice am I following? Why have I attended today’s mass? Is it because of convention or out of love for God? Here he cited the example of a nurse who refuses to participate in an abortion and consequently loses her job as an example of a person who follows their conscience. The apostles as we hear in today’s reading are transformed and proclaim the Resurrected Christ. Fath...

After spending a month in Goa, returning back to Nashik wasn’t a very pleasant prospect. Not that Nashik is bad or the train journey uncomfortable. In fact, in the four years that I’ve been travelling up and down between Goa and Nashik, this is only the second time that the train (I mean the train, Mangala Express) arrived and reached the destination on time. So if anything, I ought to be happy that I didn’t have to while away precious time in a tin box in the middle of open country in the heat of summer. The unpleasant feelings didn’t stem from there but from the self-generated thoughts of moving from freedom to restriction, importance to unimportance, power to powerlessness and responsibility to imposition. Nevertheless, what must be done must be done and so in order to answer my final exams I had to return.   For nearly all of the month that I spent in Goa, I was tucked away in a remote village in Quepem called Sulcorna. The Salesian institute there is surrounded by very ...

Amish Tripathi, The Oath of the Vayuputras , Westland Limited, 2013, ISBN 978-93-82618-34-8, pp. 575, Rs. 350. Having read the first two books of this trilogy, I was eagerly waiting for the final book to conclude what had been a thoroughly exciting and thrilling adventure. On accidentally stumbling across this book, my first reaction was joy. I took up the book with eagerness and began flipping through the pages but by the time I had reached the fiftieth page, I knew that this was not the same Amish who had produced the two previous thrillers. Despite the lavish praise bestowed on the book and the author, I couldn’t help but feel that it was all misplaced. The story is supposed to take up the narration where it left off in the previous section but I didn’t pick it up immediately, probably because it’s been about three years since I read ‘The Secret of the Nagas’. The time lapse probably had a large effect on my reading experience but after reading the first two books I was l...