Tomichan Matheikal's blog

“If you keep doing the same things, you will keep getting the same results,” Dave Ramsey said. It doesn’t matter who Dave Ramsey is. I don’t know, in fact. Albert Einstein could have said that as well. From the time BJP came to power in Delhi, India has been doing more or less the same thing: sectarian politics which favours one particular community and marginalises all others. Since the majority of Indians belong to the community favoured by BJP, no other party could arrive at an effective strategy for winning elections. People obviously want favours from those in power. And BJP is giving those favours to the majority. The majority will then vote BJP. BJP continues to rule. Happily. Till date. And so some genius in the other camp struck upon a strategy. Divide the majority community along caste lines. This is not a new strategy at all. This was effectively made use of in all the Hindi belt states earlier many times by many parties. What is new now is that almost all the non-BJP ...

Image from City With No Divorce I attended a wedding ceremony today at St Xavier’s Church near Kottayam in Kerala (India). What I liked most was the homily which was based on the fact that a particular town in Bosnia-Herzegovina has no divorces. I checked it out with the help of Google and got this: City With No Divorce . “ Siroki Brijeg is a rural town of 30,000 inhabitants… The city has suffered centuries of war and famine, cultural and political strife. Yet, not one single divorce has been recorded .” The secret is the cross. Of Jesus. The homily said. The wedding ceremony in Siroki Brijeg has an additional ritual: the couple are made to choose a cross on which they pledge to be faithful to each other till the end. ‘Marriage Crucifix’ is the name given to the tradition. It’s not just a wedding ritual; it’s meant for the entire married life. The cross on which they pledge is taken home as a holy icon to be looked at every day! What the ritual means is this: you are not marryi...

Brownie snuggles up against me every evening. Whenever her pregnancy advances, she does this: get close to me. She has a way of getting me to pat her forehead and belly. She will rub her head against my palm until I start patting her.  Eventually she will get me to prepare a safe and comfortable set-up for her kittening. She has a way with me, so much so that Maggie says Brownie is the only creature who has succeeded in making me toe the line. I want to celebrate Brownie today. With some of her pics. Brownie was just a month-and-a-half old then. Her siblings Dessie and Denny are here too. Dessie is still with us in robust health while Denny disappeared long ago. Male cats are not quite loyal, I learnt.  With Bobs, her son, who also left us eventually Let me conclude this celebration with a short video in which Brownie displays her majestic indifference to Kingini, the latest addition to my feline family.  Related posts Kingini The Story of Kingini

  Book Review Title: Gods and Ends Author: Lindsay Pereira Publisher: Penguin Vintage, 2021 Pages: 205 This is a book which presents characters taken from real life. You will think, as you read the novel, that you know this character and this and this too. Only the names sound different, even exotic: Vaz, D’Souza, Sequeira, and so on. All the characters are Goan Catholics living in Orlem, Mumbai. All the major characters are tenants of Obrigado Mansion, a rundown building belonging to aged Francisco Fernandez who lives with his daughter-in-law, occupying two of the rooms in the mansion. All other rooms are occupied by families that are grappling with quite a few problems. There are five families plus one widow who lives alone in one of the rooms. Each one of these characters catches our attention with their unique earthiness. The Sequeira family in Room 108, for example, is headed by Jude Sequeira who is little more than an alcoholic. He has a job in a factory. But sinc...

Today is the World Philosophy Day, a friend reminded me in the morning. That friend is a philosopher. He has been a professor of philosophy for most part of his life. Great man he is like Immanuel Kant. The only one great person in my life who knew me from my infantile adolescence and stayed with me until now, the autumn of my life. UNESCO observes the third Thursday of November as the World Philosophy Day, I learnt after I received the message from Prof. What does philosophy mean to ordinary mortals like me? [And you, may I dare to ask?] Philosophy died long ago. Poetry died a little later. Prof and I were students of philosophy together at The Retreat in Yercaud [Tamil Nadu, India] in the early 1980s. My early twenties. His too. But he was a mature person unlike me. I was silly. So I didn’t learn much philosophy while he learnt too much and became a Doctor of Philosophy. What surprises me is that he has continued the friendship till this day in spite of my congenital sillin...

  Book Review Title: Old God's Time Author: Sebastian Barry Publisher: Faber & Faber, London, 2023 Pages: 261 Much of our personality is shaped in our childhood. Traumatic experiences can distort one's personality irreparably. Thomas Kettle (Tom), the protagonist of Sebastian Barry's latest novel, is one such person whose very soul was wrung out by the Christian Brothers (a Catholic congregation of ascetics) in whose orphanage he grew up. These Brothers abused him sexually. Old God's Time is not a psychological thriller, however. It is a metaphysical novel that explores the impact of our early memories on our later life and the ineluctable subjectivity of reality. Tom is 66 when the novel begins. He is a retired police detective who was earlier in the British army. He has now chosen to live in a relatively secluded place overlooking the Irish Sea. Memories don't leave him alone, however, and his memories aren't any kind to him. Tom has had a catastrophic li...

It is impossible to love politicians. I love Mahua Moitra just because I hate politicians. Mahua is not a politician; she is a flame. A wildfire, that’s what she is.   A flame wearing windshield-like spectacles and an elegantly pleated sari has haunted many a hopeful day of mine. The flame grew into a conflagration that engulfed Hastinapura’s Central Vista and incinerated the phoney old men there who deluded millions of people with the charm of a thick-lipped, smooth-tongued, cockeyed, snow-haired pied piper. That flame licked the Citizenship Amendment Act , Manipur violence , Hindenburg Report , and scorched the piper’s own Adani. The male bastion of Hastinapura that would love to disrobe a trillion Draupadis, however elegantly pleated their saris be, trembled like a leaf caught in a storm, when Mahua Moitra rose to speak quite unlike a contemporary Bengali who is willing to sell Tagore’s Santiniketan to the new custodians of Bharatiya culture. Who but Mahua Moitra wou...

  Book Review Title: Quarterlife Author: Devika Rege Publisher: HarperCollins Fourth Estate, 2023 Pages: 403 This novel left me quite puzzled. So I returned to it with a staunch determination to read it again because I read some of the rave reviews it had received. What did I miss? I didn’t read it again entirely. I just couldn’t. It didn’t make that sort of appeal to me. I went through certain parts again. It didn’t create any better impression on me. But it had been long-listed for the Booker and many reviewers of good journals found it excellent. Something within me agreed with those reviews too. The Hindu said that “every page you turn, the book’s universe mirrors our everyday reality, the hyperfused gaze magnifying the cracks.” The Hindu ’s fortnightly publication, Frontline , said that the novel is “thickly packed with ideas that threaten to clog its flow until the narrative changes gear towards the end, saving the day.” The Hindustan Times thought that the au...

  Bernard Shaw's play, Captain Brassbound's Conversion,  is a study of various kinds of evils or follies masquerading as virtues. Justice is in focus particularly. What we imagine as justice is often nothing more than revenge. In the play, Howard who is a judge and his sister-in-law Cicely who is an explorer arrive at the residence of Rankin, a Presbyterian minister in Morocco. Howard's brother Miles was a friend of Rankin. Miles is no more. He had married a local woman and moved to Brazil where he died. Howard believes that the widow and her family members seized all the wealth of Miles. He used the judiciary to grab that wealth for himself. Cicely wants to explore Morocco and Rankin arranges a guide, Captain Brassbound. It turns out that Brassbound is Miles's son and he seeks to take revenge on Judge Howard for the injustice he perpetrated on the bereaved family of Miles in the name of justice. "Justice!" exclaims the judge. "I think you mean vengeance,...

Motivational enterprises can be very rewarding. Gaur Gopal Das is a monk and a motivational guru. That’s double dhamaka. If you wear saffron robes, you get to make a lot of money in India. On top of that, you are a motivational guru! Then you are possibly sitting on a gold mine or riding your Rolls-Royce laughing all the way to the bank. I’m not saying this. Gaur Gopal Das is. In one of his infinite motivational speeches , the Guru said something which I remember as: If you work as a teacher in India for ten years, you save about one or two lakh rupees. If you are a software engineer, you may earn 30-40 lakh. A politician in India can earn something like 30-40 crore in that period. And someone like me, wearing the saffron, can rake in 300 to 400 crore rupees in that period pretty easily. Gaur Gopal Das was not just employing some hyperbole. His cult, ISKCON, earns millions of dollars every year. Religion sells more than anything else in India. If it is able to masquerade as moti...

One of the best novels ever written is Dostoevsky’s Karamazov Brothers [also translated as The Brothers Karamazov ]. Alyosha, Ivan and Dmitri are the three brothers of the title. Each one of them presents a particular way of looking at life, a unique personality. Alyosha is a personification of goodness, Ivan is a man of the intellect, and Dmitri is all passions. The narrator of the novel tells us that the hero is Alyosha whose story the book really is. But all the three brothers play more or less equal roles and each one of them catches our attention with a vice-like grip. Ivan is the one who has captured my attention right from the first time I read the novel decades ago. Dostoevsky wouldn’t endorse my admiration for Ivan, of course. Alyosha is Dostoevsky’s ideal human being. He is a 20-year-old handsome person who is a living saint. He is training to be a monk in a monastery. His religious faith is deep and mature. His love for mankind arises from a profound understanding of h...

The tragedy of modern human, according to Vaclav Havel, is not that we know less and less about the meaning of life but that it bothers us less and less. Perhaps we have no time for such things now. We are too busy with the business of getting on in life. When writers begin to brush aside vital issues for the sake of avoiding troubles with the authorities, a country is sure to be on a path to degeneration. What good is writing devoid of integrity? German writer Bertolt Brecht wrote a poem about the writer’s agony. The government ordered that all books with dangerous teachings should be publicly burnt. A lot of good books were dispatched forthwith to their funeral pyres. One poet who was in exile was chagrined to see that his books were not there on the list of those to be burnt. He was sad, shocked, furious and distressed. He wrote a letter to the ruler: “Burn me, burn me!... Have I not / Always spoken the truth in my books? And no / You treat me like a liar! I order you: / Burn ...