Tomichan Matheikal's blog

The height of xenophobia - remember this face? Last month, Scotland elected 37-year-old Humza Haroon Yousaf of Pakistani origin as the head of their government. A few months before that, the United Kingdom elected Rishi Sunak as their Prime Minister. Sunak’s parents are Indians – Punjabis, to be precise. Kamala Harris, vice president of the USA, has Indian roots too. Can someone like that – a person of Italian origin, say – become India’s Prime Minister? Is it hypocrisy or xenophobia that prevents India from being more open towards diverse cultures and races? Both, I guess. Our hypocrisy is phenomenal. We pretend to be everything that we are not. The leader will be preaching tolerance and love for all people while his followers are attacking places of worship belonging to other religions. The same leader will be preaching about morality in politics while his mentor is engaged in buying MLAs and MPs belonging to other parties. This post is not about our hypocrisy, I remember.

Holy men are detached from everything.  Attachment is a sin that arises from ignorance.  Ignorance prevents us from attaining the realisation that everything on the earth is maya, illusion. Ordinary mortals live in illusion.  So they are attached.  Attached to their family.  To money.  Possessions.  Holy men are not attached to anything.  That’s why they don’t even marry.  They are not attached to people.  But, as some jester said, even holy men have one flaw or another.  Otherwise they wouldn’t be just holy; they would be gods. We don’t know if the jester is entirely right.  The jester is just an ordinary mortal.  And he is making a judgment about a mortal many times greater than him.  If a man many times greater has at least one flaw, if not more, then how many flaws does an ordinary mortal like the jester suffer from?  Simple logic makes us suspect the jester’s claim.  He being an ordinary mortal suffers from many flaws.  Therefore his logic must suffer from many fla

Sunday Musings BJP’s Kerala state general secretary, Surenderan, has an opinion that is quite different from that of his party about women’s entry to the Sabarimala temple.  He thinks that Lord Ayappan, the presiding deity at Sabarimala, is not a misogynist though he is a “perpetual celibate.”  But his party was quick to distance itself from the Facebook post of the state general secretary.  The state president, Kummanam Rajasekharan, dismissed the secretary’s view as “personal.” How many compromises can we make between our personal views and those of the organisation or party or system to which we belong religiously? I am an absolute hypocrite when it comes to religion.  I find it impossible to believe anything of what religions teach.  My very being rebels against the teachings much as I acknowledge the inevitable role of delusions and illusions in a normal man’s life.  In spite of the nausea they germinate in me, I participate in certain religious rituals. I partic

“I expect you to be sincere and as an honourable man never to utter a single word that you don't really mean.”   Alceste, the protagonist of Moliere’s comedy, The Misanthrope , utters these words in the opening scene of the play.  Alceste wanted a world of genuine people.  His desire was not as demanding as that of Jesus or the Buddha.  Yet Alceste became a comic character in the society while Jesus and the Buddha became gods. Source Alceste lived in the 17 th century when the world was more complex than when Jesus demanded childlike innocence as the price of the ticket to heaven.  The Buddha had found it even more impossible to accept life’s absurdity than Jesus, let alone Alceste.  The Buddha sought deliverance in the nonexistence of nirvana while Jesus nailed his body’s abominable passions to the cross and thus delivered his soul from those passions. Moliere’s Alceste is more human than these gods.  He eventually accepted the limitations of human nature.  None o

In 1999, Thomas L Friedman argued (in his book, Lexus and the Olive Tree ) that no two countries that both had a McDonald’s had ever fought a war against each other since it got its McDonald’s.  The decade that followed disproved Friedman.  However, the point he was trying to make was valid.  He was using McDonald’s as a symbol of the middle class.  The presence of McDonald’s in a country indicated the rise of the middle class.  And the middle class is not interested in violence and war.  The middle class would rather relish a chicken burger than feel patriotism flowing through their veins when some semi-literate sadhu demands that the women give birth to ten children so that the population of a particular religion rises.    The middle class is essentially hypocritical.  Its religion is not about spirituality at all; it is about social encounters, social niceties and mutual utilisation of social connections. The middle class is interested in improving their social and economic

Fiction Paras is a bundle of paradoxes.  “East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,” he believes firmly, choosing to ignore the fact that it was said by somebody from the West.   Paras believes that the East and the West have their own diametrically opposed civilisations, though he has no qualms about wearing Western dress all the time, the necktie included.  The East is mystical and mythical while the West is rational and scientific, Paras argues.  And the mysticism and mythology of the East are superior to the science and technology of the West.  But Paras would not live without his beloved laptop and the latest version of the mobile phone. Centuries before the Westerner formulated the mathematical identity, infinity minus infinity equals infinity , Indian mysticism had formulated it, argues Paras.  “Look at Brihadaranyka Upanishad, for example.  It says, ‘ Poornamata, poornamitam ...’ That is, infinity here, infinity there; take away infinity fro