Tomichan Matheikal's blog

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Generation Gap

AI-generated illustration I always believed that generation gap wouldn’t be a problem for me because I had failed to grow up psychologically. My hairs greyed and my skin has begun to show some wrinkles. But I can climb up the stairs with greater ease than a teenager of today. I can challenge my young students to go on a trek in the mountains and I’m sure I’ll conquer greater heights than them with much ease. More importantly, I can smile more sweetly than them. I am more open to new ideas, my blood boils at injustices unlike theirs, I have dreams, ideals and principles… I was condemned to go back to the classroom. It’s for a short while, of course. I’m substituting someone. Initially I was excited. I thought I was getting an opportunity to be young once again. But the actual classrooms have all been terrible disappointments. The teenagers in front of me look so senile, behave like grumpy octogenarians who yawn all the way from morning to evening unable to understand or appreciate a

Newton’s Apple

Introduction : The roots of this absurd fiction lie in a Malayalam poem titled Apple and Newton : an absurd poem , written by Veeraankutty in Mathrubhumi weekly dated 28 July 2024. When the apple fell, it was the theory of gravitation that actually fell on Isaac Newton’s head. Or was it Newton that fell into the theory? Nothing is absolutely certain when we come to Newton’s and such people’s levels of thinking. That uncertainty was discovered much later, of course, by Werner Heisenberg. A little before Heisenberg discovered the uncertainty of science, Albert Einstein won nothing less than the Nobel Prize for his Relativity Theory. Newton’s laws of motion were not absolute, Einstein told us. For example, they don’t apply to love. It was Einstein who declared that “Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.” Most probably it was not just any ordinary apple that fell on Newton’s head. There was no apple tree anywhere in the vicinity, in the first place. The apple f

Romancing with Nature

Kingini and Plato have no aesthetic sense. They are killers by instinct, I think. Sadistic too. They catch the prey and play with it until it is rendered lifeless. Once the prey is dead, Kingini and Plato will abandon it and go in search of another victim. Kingini and Plato are my cats. Mother and son, both together have driven quite a few creatures here to extinction, I think. Lizards and chameleons are their usual victims. The cicadas have fallen silent in the bushes. Once in a while Kingini and Plato discover a small snake too to play with. Highly venomous ones! What worries me these days is their newfound fondness for butterflies. They have become experts in catching butterflies. They just sit and watch a butterfly for a while and then one jump - the butterrfly will be in their mouth. By the time I rush to save the little creature, it is usually too late. Most of the time I don't see these hunts. I see only the dead remains of the tiny beauties. Nature is full of such cruel

The Religion of Poonch Rebellion

Book Title: October 1947: Wails of Fallen Autumn Leaves Author: Ankush Sharma Publisher: Notion Press, 2023 Pages: 319 Religion has never ceased to baffle me ever since I said good bye to it in my twenties. On the one hand, we are told that religion is meant to foster goodness in the human heart, while on the other, what we actually witness is incessant brutality perpetrated in its name day after day. Why is there such an appalling gap between the professed objective and the actual reality? I am yet to find a satisfactory answer. Ankush Sharma’s novel, October 1947 , is not about religion. It is about the Poonch Rebellion that followed India’s Independence. What runs throughout the novel, however, is a Hindu-Muslim conflict. Rather a Muslim onslaught on Hindus. The novel projects Muslims, too many of them at any rate, as heartless rapists and bloodthirsty murderers. The Hindus are all their victims in the novel. The initial leader of the Muslim Conference in Poonch is M

Plastic Killer

Joy drowned in the stinking filth generated by the city day after day. It happened in the city of Thiruvananthapuram, capital of Kerala, two days back. Joy, a young sanitation worker, dared to plunge into the Amayizhanchan canal - a 5.40 km-long canal originating in the heart of the city and ending at Akkulam Lake – in order to clean it. The filthy water gained a current due to the heavy rain and dragged him along into a tunnel where he died. His dead body was recovered after two days of frantic search by a group of scuba divers and a six-member Navy team. Joy is just one of the many, many victims created by the waste we throw around. The Amayizhanchan canal had become nothing more than a revolting drain just like many other canals and rivers in the country. Clogged with plastic and other waste materials people dump senselessly. I remember the great deluge of 2018 in Kerala. The river that runs through my village was inundated. The water level rose intimidatingly moment by moment

The Odour of Death

The Tree Our living room smells of death, according to Maggie. It’s because Maggie associates the aroma of incense sticks with death. She has reasons for doing so. The only time Catholics in Kerala light incense sticks at home is when someone dies. Incense sticks keep burning incessantly near the corpse until it is taken away for funeral. I started burning incense sticks in my living room when Maggie and I were working in Delhi. I don’t know why I started the habit. But once I did, there was no stopping. Incense sticks have continued to burn in my living room for over two decades now. But I don’t associate the smell with death. I smell serenity when I light those sticks. Maggie has learnt to tolerate the smell of my serenity. The branches of a mammoth tree that grew just outside my gate were cut down a few minutes back. The branches had become a potential threat to people and vehicles that passed beneath it. They had to be cut. They were younger than me though. The tree is onl