Gandhi, for Putin, is merely a protocol stop

These days I watch certain Indian intellectuals—once loud, now faint shadows in the Modi era—waiting for any passing gesture to revive their old, muddy idealism. Vladimir Putin came, placed flowers on Gandhi’s pyre spot. A simple protocol. It doesn’t mean Putin is a non-violent person; I doubt he follows even two percent of Gandhian values in any practical sense. He was simply following a protocol. Yet a lost journalist suddenly announced a moral sunrise. I feel it is like a moral anarchism to which Gandhi, Tolstoy and so called liberal Intelligentsia belong . Gandhi has long become an object of protocol in India, not a living value. If Idi Amin had ever visited India, even he—human-flesh eater—would have placed flowers on Gandhi. Protocol is a strange detergent; it washes everyone equally.
Gandhi’s own moral universe was so intense, so overlit, that even the smallest human gesture became a thunderclap. When he heard that his son Manilal, a thirteen-year-old boy in South Africa, had kissed a girl, he took a fast to repent—he, not the boy. A child’s innocent kiss became a sin in his eyes. The irony remains: Gandhi himself became a father at sixteen, yet expected monkish purity from a child. This is the impossible architecture of Gandhian ethics—beautiful to quote, brutal to inhabit.
To follow Gandhi in a full sense is nearly impossible. Even Leo Tolstoy, preaching purity like a monk, could not manage his own household; his moral fire burnt his family more than the world. If a nation embraced that kind of moral anarchism, it would scatter like dry husk in the wind. But these intellectuals still cling to symbols. Perhaps symbols are the last things that remain when relevance leaves.

Why Did Samuel Beckett Create Bone Blocks
This paragraph is on subconscious writing, bone music, and the monkish silence Beckett carved around himself.
“The writing comes. I don’t write it.”—Samuel Beckett
Beckett said this once in conversation. Elsewhere, half-joking yet painfully true, he muttered: “I am not the author. I am the stenographer.”
I am reading Samuel Beckett’s Letters, that small corridor between ’66 and ’89. Even in those private pages he begins to peel language, as if words were a skin he could not tolerate for long. A sentence comes, then sheds itself, and what remains is a thin bone—chilled, clean, strangely alive.
It feels like a shower of subconscious emissions. What was their meaning? I don’t think even Beckett was sure. A shy, reclusive man by nature, he preferred a safe stance. That’s exactly why he shifted to French—English was too lush, too ornamental; French allowed him to become more monkish, to get closer to the bone. The more he approached the subconscious, the more he needed that austerity.
In Hindu scriptures, mantras appear with a footnote: there is no need to understand their meaning. They are indecipherable; they move by vibration. I find this closer to Beckett’s method. Writing came to him before meaning—an emission, a vibration. Something yogic passed through him, though he was no yogi. He took these signals and chiseled them down to residue, to bone blocks. In his own words, “What I do is the residue.”
He left spaces between the blocks. Those spaces are not empty; they are denser than the bony chips. They hum with bone music—mysterious, subjective, heard differently by each reader. Everybody carries a different wavelength, which is why no one can categorize Beckett into one theme. Writers like Naipaul, who walk only on flesh and see flesh more than soul, could never hear these frequencies. He dismissed Beckett as an abstraction, unaware that Beckett was tuning to vibration.

Samuel Beckett’s House — A Bone Block
Beckett’s Ussy house stands like a pause in the landscape. A pale, self-effacing structure, almost shy of its own walls. The shutters are drawn as if the house decided long ago that the world is too bright, too talkative. It prefers to remain inward. Even the trees beside it bend with a hushed caution, guarding its solitude.
I look at this house and feel a strange kinship. It is neither picturesque nor dramatic; it simply is—holding its silence the way Beckett held his sentences: pared down, emptied, bone-clean. Here he lived like a monk, walking long paths, sitting at a small desk, carving language until only the essential breath remained. In this modest shelter, he shed adjectives the way trees shed leaves before winter.
Such spaces do not entertain you; they confront you. They ask: How much of yourself can you bear when the world is removed? Beckett answered by returning again and again to this quiet corner—anonymity as protection, austerity as clarity. Even the Nobel Prize news unsettled him; he feared it would disturb the bone-clean life he had built.
His later letters still hum with that silence—faint vibrations of bone music.