Tomichan Matheikal's blog

India has no national language because the country has too many languages. Apart from the officially recognised 22 languages are the hundreds of regional languages and dialects. It would be preposterous to imagine one particular language as the national language in such a situation. That is why the visionary leaders of Independent India decided upon a three-language policy for most purposes: Hindi, English, and the local language. The other day two pranksters from the Hindi belt landed in Bengaluru airport wearing T-shirts declaring Hindi as the national language. They posted a picture on X and it evoked angry responses from a lot of Indians who don’t speak Hindi.  The worthiness of Hindi to be India’s national language was debated umpteen times and there is nothing new to add to all that verbiage. Yet it seems a reminder is in good place now for the likes of the above puerile young men. Language is a power-tool . One of the first things done by colonisers and conquerors is to

They say that childhood is the best phase of one’s life. I sigh. And then I laugh. I wish I could laugh raucously. But my voice was snuffed out long ago. By the conservatism of the family. By the ignorance of the religious people who controlled the family. By educators who were puppets of the system fabricated by religion mostly and ignorant but self-important politicians for the rest. I laugh even if you can’t hear the sound of my laughter. You can’t hear the raucousness of my laughter because I have been civilised by the same system that smothered my childhood with soft tales about heaven and hell, about gods and devils, about the non sequiturs of life which were projected as great. I lost my childhood in the 1960s. My childhood belonged to a period of profound social, cultural and political change. All over the world. But global changes took time to reach my village in Kerala, India. India was going through severe crises when I was struggling to grow up in a country where

Herbert Marcuse introduced the concept of one-dimensional existence, back in 1964. A one-dimensional person is a product of consumerism, technology, and conformist ideologies. One-dimensional people are happy with material comforts and superficial freedoms. They are rendered incapable of critical thinking, creativity, and authentic individuality. Hence they fail to see the system’s fault lines and injustices. In fact, the creators of the system make the society appear so efficient and materially fulfilling that all opposition succumbs to a natural death. The system creates the people’s needs through the media, propaganda of all sorts, advertisements and a mass culture. Probably, Marcuse’s concept is more relevant today than in 1960s. How else would we explain the victories of our present-day leaders, the latest being Donald Trump’s. Why would a nation like the United States of America elect a man like Donald Trump as its president? As Ali Chougule writes in today’s Free Press Jou

Aroon Purie, editor of India Today , thinks that Trump owes his victory to such issues as price rise, housing crisis, influx of immigrants, and the conservative rebellion against elite wokeism. Trump presidency portends populism, nativism, isolationism, and protectionism, says Purie quoting Condoleeza Rice. The world may not be a happier place with Trump leading America. “What is the world according to Trump?” India Today ’s senior journalist Raj Chengappa asks. His answer: “… it is ensuring America’s interests first with those of every other nation coming a very distant second.” Trump thinks that hitherto the other nations were eating America’s lunch. The allusion is not only to the immigrants but also to America “paying everyone else’s bills to maintain the global order.” Though Trump would like to play a key role in bringing the two wars [Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Gaza] to an end, he will not do anything that will involve a price tag that the US has to pay for. Chengappa worri