The Lunatic, the saint, the lover

The Lunatic the Saint the Lover

All the characters mentioned in the topic are humans, of course with certain deviations from normal human beings. It’s a matter of chance, destiny and deed which makes a person any of these. But it is not as if some body wants to become a saint and he becomes one. In the same way being a lunatic or a lover is not a conscious choice. However it’s possible for a person to be all of these at different points in his life. A saint may have been a lunatic or a lover. One may be saint in somebody eyes and a lunatic in somebody else’s. The world may not agree unanimously on the question of who is a saint and who is not. A common point among these three, the lunatic. the saint and the lover, is that they are often misunderstood by this world- a world full of average men.

Lunatics are people who have exempted their brains from the usual work it does. They are smart enough to realize the futility of all this. People of this kind often live in a world of their own. May be they can look through the stupidity of this world- the stupidity of having to live intelligently. You can easily see them in railway stations, bus stops, market places and other public places in India (I have never been outside India and therefore don’t have much information about foreign lunatics). May be they also have homes, family and friends. I have used “may be” because the lunatics I have seen till now were homeless destitutes. A lunatic is free from guilt, remorse, good will, wisdom, happiness or pain. You require a working brain to feel all these. All things that happen have their meaning to men only when man uses his brain to see, analyze and feel those things. A lunatic is free from the dictates of reason and logic. All great philosophers and saints have urged man to control his brains and his senses. A lunatic goes further. He gets rid of his brain and achieves what I will call a strange neutral bliss.

There may be all sorts of reasons which cause man to be a lunatic. It may be a shock of a grave loss, a fear, a passion and so many other things. It may be wrong to say that they don’t have a definite pattern of doing things but everything that they do defies usual logic. A common man is always a potential lunatic in the sense that that the turning of the common man into a lunatic is a possible realty. It is certain that all of us are lighter shades of actual lunatics. The world usually laughs at lunatics and sometimes dreads them. Yes, we laugh or dread them lest the world accuses us of being lunatics.


A Saint is an uncommon character. With the passage of time this character has become almost extinct. Most of the time a saint is first a dead man, then a saint. Being dead is an additional qualification for being considered a saint. Jesus, Saint Joan and others met violent deaths before anyone considered them saints. Here it would be wrong to understand saints as people canonized by the church. Here we only mean what the word ‘Saint’ means in English. Again people differ as to who is a saint and who is not. To Muslims the prophet was saint but to others he was a mere camel driver who was ambitious. In the same way Jesus is a saint to the Christians but to Pilate he was something else. Donne wants the lovers (Canonization) to be granted sainthood (here it’s the sainthood conferred by the church). It is not strange that people who may be saints to some may be termed rascals by others. We all know that Czar Nicolas and his wife believed Rasputin to be a Saint. What he actually was is too well known. As I mentioned saints are almost extinct. A possible reason for this could be that the modern conditions are hostile to saints. The modern world is full of men who might yell and shout at any attempt by anyone to play saint. Earlier you could become a saint even by fooling people, by claming that that you have direct conversation with god and that you often invite him for lunch. Modern man is smart. He knows that if he can’t become a saint, so can’t you. Another reason why saints are less in supply is that there is no demand for them. May be the world has got fed up of them. Still another reason could be a change in the essential qualifications of being a saint. Osho talked of sex, salvation and other big things. Then he talked something about salvation through sex and some of us believe him to be a saint. May be some decades after Bill Gates’s death, we shall start believing that he was a saint and that it was extremely unjust of the American Government to question his monopoly-the monopoly of the holy sect i.e. Microsoft.

A lover is different things to different people. To some he is sick man diseased with a massive misunderstanding. This definition applies if we take love to mean a misunderstanding between two fools. Others believe a lover to be a selfless human who is willing to forget everything for his beloved. Still others might brand a lover to be person addicted to the mental slavery of the object of his love. There are all kinds of lovers – smart boys with smart faces on smart bikes. Kurta-pyjama clad with long hairs and longer beards and dhoti-kurta clad with thick glasses on their eyes and always chewing something (their teeth unwilling to support them at this late stage of life). An interesting thing about lovers is that most of the literary ink of the world has been used either to describe lovers or their activity i.e. love. Every culture, nation and locality has them. The west has its Romeo and Juliet and we have our Laila and Majnu. In one respect a lover is very different from a lunatic or a saint and that is that a lunatic or a saint continues to be a lunatic or a saint throughout his life once he is branded as such but a lover often becomes something else after a brief period. He can become anything from a husband to a lunatic. There might be exceptions but a lifelong lover has to have a lot of stamina to be an exception. A lover is always a popular character and much is talked and written about him. A broad categorization of lovers may be attempted- the faithful lovers and the faithless lovers. The difference between the two is, as someone said: faithless lovers know the pleasures of love. It is the faithful who undergo its pains.

It not uncommon for a lover to become a lunatic and there are a few cases of lovers becoming saints. Tulsidas was a passionate lover of his wife until her rebuke turned him towards god. Also, it’s not strange for a saint to be considered a lunatic in the earlier phases of his or her life. Saint Joan was canonized and became saint but before that she was burnt alive for heresy and was believed to be bordering on lunacy. Well the world can make one anything- a lunatic, a saint or a lover.