There is no other book that I loved more than Dracula, and I used to read many versions of the same in English and Malayalam during my childhood, and I have known Bram Stoker before I knew William Shakespeare. Count Dracula has been part of my early life more than anyone else and even inspired me to read more horror and made me watch my first horror movies, and my first horror movie in English to be watched on a VCR, John Carpenter’s Vampires. It would introduce me to the entity called “the vampire” which would never be redefined better than it did for me in this work.
Dracula was one person who never really scared me. But people around the world were worth being afraid of more than this one vampire. Some of them suck the life out of you, others money, and the worst of the suck the happiness out of you, and they are the vampires of the heart and soul. Most of them feel that they are the only people in the world, and the Earth no longer revolves around the sun, but instead exist for their own needs and all the people in the world are made for them to use. This one-human-centric universe have been sucking everything good out of our known world for centuries.
Consider the case of Count Dracula. He wanted to migrate to another country leaving his rural world behind. For the same, he leaves his old world behind and is ready to blend in with the so called urban people. But what does he get in the end? He is forced to keep running and in the end gets a stake through the end for trying to understand other cultures and mingle with them. He was a man of nature, blended with his natural environment and feared by the people of his land due to him being an introvert.
The beautiful Bran Castle, commonly known as the Dracula Castle (photo from wiki)
Now, there comes the problem of being introvert. There are many organizations for supporting even the dumbest things in the world saying that it is one’s personal life and there is the choice to be different. But being an introvert is rather too difficult, as the other take away or rather suck everything away, and bening terribly talkative has been becoming a need, and on the tip of the talks, there would be big lies which will help one to advance in life. The others who can’t lie or show off their vanity will suffer like Dracula.
Still, the society considers introverts and people who can’t use tell a beautiful lie every hour or so as not easily acceptable. Being talkative should be a choice, and when people are chosen according to the performances during a few minutes of interview, it is a case of losing the right person for the job and instead finding someone who can talk and justify all mistakes and atrocities. You can’t find the right person by talking for a few minutes, because lies are too easy to say for the new generation designed just to succeed. This is the world of fake smiles, and the season of faking love.
Dracula was undoubtedly an introvert and a man who couldn’t socialize easily, and the use of diaries, letters and logs in the work and making it an epistolary one means that it was rather the idea of a group of people from one side of the society, and even the ideas claimed to be of other people could have also been forged. May be he had some bad teeth, and it is also possible that he was too much addicted to wine – there goes the ideas about bad teeth and drinking the red fluid. He just belonged to another culture and it is usual to be afraid of the customs and traditions, plus he had his own special abilities.
Christopher Lee playing the Count, considered the common depiction (photo from wiki)
It is a usual misconception to related Dracula to the devil, and it is plain wrong. The vampire is surely not the devil, and beyond that, the Count has a personality which is far better than this plagued society which is not just affected by hatred towards other religion, caste, race and community, but also towards the random people who don’t know one’s idol or their most awesome person, a sportsperson, a movie star – any random celebrity. Yes, vampires have to look scary and not like a dumb teenager, but the story of the Count is debatable. Dracula was million times better than most of the vain humans of this age even on his worst day. Yes, the Indian cricket fans have already proved the same with their racist and sexist comments.
TeNy.
The Tea Cerebrations 