Tomichan Matheikal's blog

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Going Places with Sophie

Sophie as imagined by Copilot Designer Going Places is a short story by A R Barton prescribed for grade 12 students of a Central Education Board in India (CBSE). Sophie, the young protagonist, is just completing her school and will soon be working in a biscuit factory near her home as most girls of her socioeconomic class usually do. Sophie doesn’t want that future, though. She has big dreams. She wants to open a boutique, or become an actress, or be a fashion designer. She is in love with Danny Casey, the national football champion, and believes that he reciprocates the love. She believes that her fantasies about her meeting Danny in the arcade are real. Her father who is very practical and realistic has only contempt for Sophie’s fantasies. “One of these days you’re going to talk yourself into a load of trouble,” he warns his dreamer-daughter. The father is a traditional patriarch who works hard to get the family moving from day to day. He can be rough and blunt. He doesn’t know a

The Waste Land as a comic book

One page from the comic book Who would have imagined that T S Eliot’s convoluted poem, The Waste Land , would one day be a comic book? I was fascinated when I came to know about it from an article in Open Culture . The sample pages reproduced in the article look charming too. My first association with The Waste Land was as a postgraduate student of English literature. The imageries and motifs of the poem caught my fancy. But I’m not sure I understood its deep intricacies. The sluggish resistance to life in the opening lines shakes your very roots, “stirring dull roots with spring rain.” We don’t want to be reborn. We are happy with our hibernation. It’s a sort of spiritual hibernation. We need a reawakening. That’s what the poem is leading you to. Eliot was shaken by the disillusionment that descended on the world after the World War I. There was untold devastation which went on to exert profound impact on society, culture, and art. The war shattered the belief in progress, rat

Beggars in a Five-trillion Economy

India’s Prime Minister has promised to make the country a $5-trillion economy by 2027. My knowledge of economics is zilch. Even if I try to learn it, I don’t think I will understand. For example, economists will take the total assets of Mukesh Ambani and mine, calculate the average, and say that my average assets amount to $52 billion, half of Ambani’s $104 billion. Mukesh Ambani’s assets amount to INR 87,31,75,68,00,000. I don’t even know how to count that figure, let alone calculate the average. Even if you find the average of that and my assets [ridiculous suggestion?] and tell me, still the figure will remain beyond my grasp (both literally and metaphorically). [Black monies don’t count in economic stats, I guess.] But India may become a $5-trillion economy by 2027. Because, as I understand, the average assets of each Indian are calculated the way I described in simplistic terms above. If you google India’s skewed economy , you will understand better what I’m saying. Here is a

Punny Sunday

Courtesy ChatGPT A friend of mine forwarded a WhatsApp message the other day. It did make me laugh. I love jokes that can really make me laugh even if they are the most basic sort, the pun-based ones. Puns are generally kiddish. But sometimes they can be super-intelligent too. Like some of the jokes forwarded by this friend. Taste a few: I think I’m becoming a social vegan… I’m avoiding meets. I married my wife for her looks. Just not the ones she’s been giving me of late. What do you call a bedpan in Russia? A Poo-tin. One of these punny funnies prompted me to make a micro-story from two points of view: the male and the female. Male chauvinist and feminist, right? Story 1 My wife returned from a biblical convention. The first thing she did was to give me a sweet hug. Reason? The preacher had said, “You should embrace your mistakes.” Story 2 My wife returned from a biblical convention. She decided to give me some good counsel. “You should embrace your mistakes,” she s

The Lies of History

Book Review Title: Solovyov and Larionov Author: Eugene Vodolazkin Translator: Lisa C Hayden Publisher: OneWorld, London, 2018 Pages: 404 H ow factual is any historical discourse? How much truth do you expect from history books? I live in a country whose government has simply erased the history of a whole era, the three-century long Mughal reign – from the history textbooks given to school students. Some of the heroes of the freedom struggle are being villainised and vice-versa. Whose history will you trust: Ramachandra Guha’s or Hitesh Shankar’s? If the lion and the deer write the history of the same period in the same forest, which history will be credible to you? The subjectivity of history is the most fundamental theme of Russian writer Eugene Vodolazkin’s 2009 novel [translated into English in 2018], Solovyov and Larionov . History is a compilation of the writer’s perspectives, obscured by time and personal biases. History is like literature to some extent. But lit

Who created you?

“Who created you?” I was asked by the catechism teacher in the Sunday class of the parish church when I was a kid of 6 or 7 years old. Like any other Catholic contemporary of mine I answered as mechanically as an android of today: “God created me.” That was the very first question of the catechism book in those days. All of us Catholic children had to memorise quite a few dozen such questions. It was followed by: “Why did God create you?” Android’s answer: “In order to know, love and serve God so that we will live with Him in the end.” It went on and on though I don’t remember any question beyond those two. I was reminded of that “little catechism” (as the question-answer booklet was known) this afternoon when a colleague of mine – the young physics teacher who found a mention in this very space a few days ago – narrated his experience in grade 12 (17-year-olds, not kids). He was speaking about the Big Bang in the class in the context of nuclear fusion and fission. He told t