KOCHI: In a multi-faith, deeply religious society like ours, constant dialogue and discourse among adherents of various denominations is a minimum requirement to achieve integration, cohesion and to ensure the spirit of national unity is appropriately nurtured.It is easy and tempting to draw attention to differences among religions, beginning with the concept of divinity, methods of worship, texts followed and a hundred other matters of detail.
But what is required is a reiteration of the underlying commonalities and the factors of concord. This is as much a matter of conceptual truism as it is of an altruistic strategic requirement for the idea of a national identity to be understood in its widest sense, as our secularism is not of the French variety of ‘Laicite’.Jiji Thomson who retired as Chief Secretary of Kerala four years ago is a staunch Orthodox Christian owing allegiance to one of the prominent eastern churches. He had a distinguished career as a civil servant during which he also served as director general of the Sports Authority of India.
His voice commands respect as one of moderation, temperance and tolerance in Kerala which is a laboratory for the peaceful coexistence of a progressive society with respect for ‘the other’. In articulating the confluence of spirituality underlying different faiths, Thomson makes a personal medical trauma the peg for its passionate espousal.
In 2020, he suffered a cardiac arrest but was saved by timely medical intervention. Written in the wake of this incident, the book, ‘Singing after the storm’ uses the pedagogical device of a dialogue to raise a broad spectrum of issues ranging from his Christian rootedness to eastern metaphysics.
Have you missed reading the great Upanishads? The essence of the holy Quran? What about the key message of Jesus who flooded the world with such a deluge of love 2,000 years ago that little streams flow even today — thinner and meaner, may be?
Using the trope of a question and answer session with a fictional character whom he terms ‘Guruji’, Jiji Thomson, from his hospital bed, flys high into the higher realms of all the great religions of the world and condenses the common bases of all into a handy, eminently-readable volume. You may attend the best of the collegiums on comparative religions and yet fail to grasp the philosophy that mankind has produced in its collective quest to understand the meaning and purpose of life. “The whole of religion is to be good and to do good,” Swami Vivekananda said and the author’s foray into Judaism, Christianity, Sufi practices, Buddhism and Hinduism seems to reinforce this fundamental principle.
For those who are seekers, Thomson provides a simplified compendium of dense profoundity in a language which is to be commended for its fluidity and ease that even a school kid will understand. “Ethereal minstrel, Pilgrim of the Sky” wrote William Wordsworth in another context. I was reminded of these lines when I was reading ‘Singing after the Storm’.The author is the chief general manager of State Bank of India (Views expressed are his own)