Profundity

'Nothing ever becomes real till experienced - even a proverb is no proverb to you till your life has illustrated it.'
- John Keats

I was watching an interview of the world famous director Adoor Goplakrishnan on Manorama News. The interviewer asked him what his daily prayer was. Adoor's reply puzzled me a bit. He said that it was 'ഇന്നെനിയ്ക്ക് പെട്ടെന്ന് ഉറക്കം വരണേ...’ which loosely translates to 'God, let me fall asleep as soon as I'm in bed...'. I thought then how strange (and even trivial) a prayer it was.

[Cut to a night-scene about one-and-a-half weeks later]

Yours truly has the privilege of actually experiencing a 'sleepless night'. Well, not in the literal sense - I did eventually fall asleep - but it was torture till then. You might have read about 'sleepless nights' - the quintessential literary cliche - but have you experienced one? Only then will you understand the profundity in Adoor's prayer.

Being a programmer wannabe, I can't resist the temptation that is recursion; so here goes.
'When I understood how profound Adoor's prayer was, Keats' words that I quoted in the beginning recursively proved themselves.'
[Don't you feel like killing me? I usually have that effect on people [big grin] ]

But seriously, I believe that is what profundity is. To make unpretentious statements that anyone will be able to identify with at some point in their lives. It does not come easy, takes a lot of insight and probably is one of the hallmarks of true greatness.

Very difficult that achieving profundity is, it's probably more difficult to be profoundly humorous. You need insight plus a sense of humor. Rare combo indeed. Try Calvin and Hobbes, you'll see what I mean :) . And for darker humor try O V Vijayan's ‘ഇത്തിരി നേരമ്പോക്ക്, ഇത്തിരി ദര്‍ശനം’(A Little Humor, A Little Insight) or 'എന്റെ ചരിത്രാന്വേഷണ പരീക്ഷകള്‍’(My Experiments with History).

Yours truly is now signing off with a quote which he believes to fall in this category.

This statement made in 1958 is growing in profundity, especially in today's context,(see the year in which he wrote this down!)
"It remains a canon of modern diplomacy that any preoccupation with oil should be concealed by calling on our still ample reserves of sanctimony."
- John Kenneth Galbraith,
'How much should a country consume?', 1958.