Skip to main content

A2Z – A Prelude


The A2Z Challenge of The Blogchatter is an incentive to write systematically every day of the month. I have completed the challenge successfully three times and each exercise ended in the release of a book. All these books are available absolutely free. Let me give the links.

Humpty Dumpty’s 10 Hats – 2022 – a collection of ten short stories. ““You have a clever way of talking about the trivial yet burning issues of the day.” Sonia Dogra’s review said.

Life: 24 Essays – 2021 – “To read this book without any depth of attention would be to do it a disservice – but it also means that one must find oneself wanting to respond. There builds a desire to be in conversation with the writer.” Yamini MacLean

Great Books for Great Thoughts – 2020 – “I’m warning you that this book, Great Books for Great Thoughts, has the potential to change your life if read seriously.” Ravish Mani

All the above books [available only in electronic form] were well-received and I am grateful. That is precisely what encourages me to participate in the campaign this year too though something within me is trying to pull me back from it. And strongly too. I shall go ahead notwithstanding the strapping temptation to take this April easy. April is the only month of vacation.

I’m going to give it a try without any promise of taking it to the last letter Z for which my planned topic is ‘Z: the last letter.’ The last letter of life is what I want it to be. The long sleep from which none of us will wake up.

Death is a theme that has caught my fancy these days. Quite a few people, much younger than me, have been taken away rather unexpectedly by that sleep in the past couple of years. What amuses me is that these tragedies did not affect me too deeply. Rather, it left me thinking of death as a deliverance from the pain of life. I want to die while I am still teaching in a classroom. My essay on Z will be as personal as the others in A2Z series this time.

A is for Authenticity. B for ‘Behold the Beauty.’ And so on. Occasionally you’ll get topics like ‘Capitalism is fated to be sad’ too: not really personal, but never theoretical or scholarly anyway. I haven’t really planned for all the letters yet. But I do hope it’s going to be interesting for you too to take this journey with me from A to Z in April.

Comments

  1. SuchitaMarch 21, 2023 at 5:59 PM

    I love the diversity and range of topics. I hope you reach Z because I'd love to read that personal essay. All the best!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 21, 2023 at 6:10 PM

      There are some programs planned for April. But I still hope to complete this campaign.

      Delete
  2. Yamini MacLeanMarch 21, 2023 at 6:32 PM

    Hari OM
    Bravo that man! You have taken courage to fill April once, more. I (a little reluctanctly) am taking this year off; there are several family and close friend matters to attend in the month and I just have to be sensible about the time involvement. But I shall be reading with great interest! YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
  3. vanderloostMarch 22, 2023 at 9:02 PM

    Looking forward to reading. I would also like to participate but keeping deadlines is a dreadful project for me.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 22, 2023 at 9:54 PM

      Deadlines are the real fun in this.

      Glad you'll be around when it starts.

      Delete
  4. Anupama JoshyMarch 25, 2023 at 11:59 AM

    Wishing you the best ! Hope I can take up this challenge in the coming years.

    ReplyDelete
  5. SantwonaMarch 28, 2023 at 8:55 AM

    You had my attention where you mentioned that you have begun to see death as a deliverance from the pain of life. Looking forward to read your perspective on life.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Rajeev MoothedathMarch 28, 2023 at 7:49 PM

    Looking forward to your posts!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 28, 2023 at 8:40 PM

      Are you there this time? You are not blogging these days!

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 1

Inside St Francis Church, Fort Kochi Moraes Zogoiby (Moor), the narrator-protagonist of Salman Rushdie’s iconic novel The Moor’s Last Sigh , carries in his genes a richly variegated lineage. His mother, Aurora da Gama, belongs to the da Gama family of Kochi, who claim descent from none less than Vasco da Gama, the historical Portuguese Catholic explorer. Abraham Zogoiby, his father, is a Jew whose family originally belonged to Spain from where they were expelled by the Catholic Inquisition. Kochi welcomed all the Jews who arrived there in 1492 from Spain. Vasco da Gama landed on the Malabar coast of Kerala in 1498. Today’s Fort Kochi carries the history of all those arrivals and subsequent mingling of history and miscegenation of races. Kochi’s history is intertwined with that of the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British, the Arbas, the Jews, and the Chinese. No culture is a sacrosanct monolith that can remain untouched by other cultures that keep coming in from all over the world. ...
6 comments
Read more

The Lights of December

The crib of a nearby parish [a few years back] December was the happiest month of my childhood. Christmas was the ostensible reason, though I wasn’t any more religious than the boys of my neighbourhood. Christmas brought an air of festivity to our home which was otherwise as gloomy as an orthodox Catholic household could be in the late 1960s. We lived in a village whose nights were lit up only by kerosene lamps, until electricity arrived in 1972 or so. Darkness suffused the agrarian landscapes for most part of the nights. Frogs would croak in the sprawling paddy fields and crickets would chirp rather eerily in the bushes outside the bedroom which was shared by us four brothers. Owls whistled occasionally, and screeched more frequently, in the darkness that spread endlessly. December lit up the darkness, though infinitesimally, with a star or two outside homes. December was the light of my childhood. Christmas was the happiest festival of the period. As soon as school closed for the...
14 comments
Read more

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 2

Fort Kochi’s water metro service welcomes you in many languages. Surprisingly, Sanskrit is one of the first. The above photo I took shows only just a few of the many languages which are there on a series of boards. Kochi welcomes everyone. It welcomed the Arabs long before Prophet Muhammad received his divine inspiration and gave the people a single God in the place of the many they worshipped. Those Arabs made their journey to Kerala for trade. There are plenty of Muslims now in Fort Kochi. Trade brought the Chinese too later in the 14 th -15 th centuries. The Chinese fishing nets that welcome you gloriously to Fort Kochi are the lingering signs of the island’s Chinese links. The reason that brought the Portuguese another century later was no different. Then came the Dutch followed by the British. All for trade. It is interesting that when the northern parts of India were overrun by marauders, Kerala was embracing ‘globalisation’ through trades with many countries. Babu...
10 comments
Read more

Schrödinger’s Cat and Carl Sagan’s God

Image by Gemini AI “Suppose a patriotic Indian claims, with the intention of proving the superiority of India, that water boils at 71 degrees Celsius in India, and the listener is a scientist. What will happen?” Grandpa was having his occasional discussion with his Gen Z grandson who was waiting for his admission to IIT Madras, his dream destination. “Scientist, you say?” Gen Z asked. “Hmm.” “Then no quarrel, no fight. There’d be a decent discussion.” Grandpa smiled. If someone makes some similar religious claim, there could be riots. The irony is that religions are meant to bring love among humans but they end up creating rift and fight. Scientists, on the other hand, keep questioning and disproving each other, and they appreciate each other for that. “The scientist might say,” Gen Z continued, “that the claim could be absolutely right on the Kanchenjunga Peak.” Grandpa had expected that answer. He was familiar with this Gen Z’s brain which wasn’t degenerated by Instag...
11 comments
Read more