Twain’s damned human race

OVER the long New Year weekend I was having an overload of information from online sources. These days the good, the bad and the ugly are all camouflaged and the truths and untruths come as ambushes hard to differentiate.

As I was reminiscing the year that had been, in the political scene we had been inundated with incoherent statements from people in power making it difficult for us to distinguish falsities from facts. The social media had not made it any easier, for with the repeated onslaughts, even lies are not distinguishable.

In this context, something about Mark Twain (pix) came to my mind. He said, “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything,” and that is so true. Only with fabrication one needs the over-use of the memory power.

If we remember, an adventurer and wily intellectual, Mark Twain wrote the classic American novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

It is he who said he would not allow schooling to interfere with his education and in this context we have multiple degree holders holding high positions who have grown too big for humanity and hence all we have is sheer wastefulness.

If you read Twain’s Huckleberry, you will understand that the novel is an ambitious and blunt examination of the society condemned with institutionalised acts of slavery, violence, bigotry and ignorance.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is the story of a young boy, Huck, and a runaway slave, Jim. The story picks up after the end of Twain’s previous novel, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, at the end of which Huck found a large sum of money.

The novel is an intense examination of the society that nurtured the writer and the two types of Southerners who largely populated the novel: the ones who were grossly and adversely influenced by the environment and the better ones who only partly digressed from the path.

The protagonist and narrator of the novel, Huck is a 13-year-old son of the local drunk of St Petersburg, Missouri, a town on the Mississippi River. The boy is often seen as an outcast because of his wayward ways and that he did not have a polished education added to his denial of a decent Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,