Jekyll and Hyde: The Good, The Bad, The Human

The good and bad that coexists within a single human shell is something that philosophy and literature have long been exploring. While it is mostly undisputed that both these elements do exist simultaneously in each being, some schools of thought argue that circumstances sprout evil in people; others claim humans have an innate tendency to be aggressive but are bound by the laws of civilization and society to keep the beast within leashed.

Of the latter, the most influential and interesting in my knowledge has been Freud who claimed that the drive to aggress is deeply rooted in the psyche and thus independent of circumstances. As a result people have an innate desire or need to inflict harm or damage and this desire needs to be fulfilled periodically, in one form or the other. He went as far as to regard self control as a form of aggression, as one deprives oneself of other satisfactions via restraints. Thus, self control was an effective but costly way of inflicting self damage to quench a need which might otherwise translate to harm on another.

Be it films or literature, there are a lot of works existent and upcoming that endeavour to explore this topic. RL Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde (of course of which Hulk was not a total ripoff of ), William Golding's Lord of the flies that tries to understand the conflict between the instinct for savagery and the construct of civilization that aims to the contain the former, Padmarajan's Jayakrishnan of Thoovanathumbikal who leads a dual life reserving carnal pleasures for the city away from his daily societal acquaintances and family in the village, David Fincher's Tyler Durden of the Fight Club, or the very recent and spectacular Jallikkettu from Lijo Jose Pellissery are a few I can recollect from the top of my head.

         

Originally published in 1886, Jekyll and Hyde was a book of such controversial nature that book shop owners outrightedly rejected stocking it. An initial narration by the author to his wife ends with the manuscript burning in the fireplace. This was though Stevenson omits any gory details on the kind of misdeeds committed by Mr. Edward Hyde, the  evil alter ego of the respected Dr. Henry Jekyll, described as someone who could be approached by none "without a visible misgiving of the flesh". This he conjectures is because all human beings are usually made of good and bad, "but Hyde alone in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil". But to Jekyll, the creator, Hyde was a part of himself and as he looked upon the ugly idol in the glass on which "evil had left an imprint of decay and deformity", he could feel no repugnance, only a leap of welcome.

The novella of hardly a hundred pages, explores the predicament of the doctor at length, torn between being himself in Mr. Hyde and the fear of exposing and endangering himself from the society that tries to cage  the Hydes that exist within and around themselves. 

It must be apparent from all the direct quotes above that I am already a fan of the writing.  While descriptive, it is succint. While verbose, it isn't forced. If you have a day or two to spare and is in search of a good read to get those grey cells exercised, this may just be it.

Ardhra Prakash

(16th October 2019)

Unlearning

Picture Courtesy: Vaibhavi Garge

Air quotes naturally accompany our every utterance of the name Eengapuzha village. 24 square kilometres in area, with a mostly non agrarian populace of over 18,000 people and thus already way outside the scope of the census definition of rural, this not so quaint town was our allotted "village" for Village Field Segment of our curriculum. It stood out starkly from all the other villages we had visited as part of the PGDRM program at IRMA and not without reason. The village had wide, tarred roads, around 4200 households that mostly had multi-storeyed homes, owned at least one car, had access to specialized medical facilities including a dialysis centre, an array of commercial eateries, and even housed a mostly lively, mall.

But the most traumatized by this were my companions, two very enterprising intellectuals who had just hard earned their undergraduation degrees from TISS, after three years of serving the poorest of the poor in West and Central Indian villages, occasionally risking their lives and jumping fences to access the only toilet in the region in order to avoid open defecation.

The first two days of our stay in a mansion like accommodation on-field, only involved us trying to make sense of how we were to design a village development report given the place seemed nothing like a village. Another concern was how no picture clicked in the vicinity would convey rurality, along the lines of what we were taught in college. So, imagine how ecstatic all three of us found ourselves to be when we chanced upon a muddy inroad, with no traces of tarring intact and interspersed with as many potholes as to our heart’s content. Add to this, there were no signs of any wealthy inhabitation or economic development marring the frame. We snapped away to glory until one of us pointed out our behaviour was bizarre to say the least.

This is precisely why this photograph is important to us as a team of prospective rural managers. That when faced with something unlike our typical understanding of the concept, rather than appreciating the welcome deviation from the rule that Indian villages had to be the hubs of poverty and underdevelopment, and analysing the fundamental ways the transformation was achieved, we were in frantic search of any element, however small, how much ever an exception, that would cement our pre existing notion of how things had to be. So, as the sky darkened around us, we revelled at how the potholes in the pictures reflected the pretty dusk clouds and agreed how our sadistic selves should be acknowledging the accomplishments of underdogs more often.

Ardhra Prakash

(9th October,2019)