Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Book Review Title: The Covenant of Water Author: Abraham Verghese Publisher: Grove Press UK, 2023 Pages: 724 “What defines a family isn’t blood but the secrets they share.” This massive book explores the intricacies of human relationships with a plot that spans almost a century. The story begins in 1900 with 12-year-old Mariamma being wedded to a 40-year-old widower in whose family runs a curse: death by drowning. The story ends in 1977 with another Mariamma, the granddaughter of Mariamma the First who becomes Big Ammachi [grandmother]. A lot of things happen in the 700+ pages of the novel which has everything that one may expect from a popular novel: suspense, mystery, love, passion, power, vulnerability, and also some social and religious issues. The only setback, if it can be called that at all, is that too many people die in this novel. But then, when death by drowning is a curse in the family, we have to be prepared for many a burial. The Kerala of the pre-Independ...

Susmesh Chandroth in his kitchen “Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought,” Poet Shelley told us long ago. I was reading an interview with a prominent Malayalam writer, Susmesh Chandroth, this morning when Shelley returned to my memory. Chandroth says he left Kerala because the state had too much of affluence which is not conducive for the production of good art and literature. He chose to live in Kolkata where there is the agony of existence and hence also its ecstasies. He’s right about Kerala’s affluence. The state has eradicated poverty except in some small tribal pockets. Today almost every family in Kerala has at least one person working abroad and sending dollars home making the state’s economy far better than that of most of its counterparts. You will find palatial houses in Kerala with hardly anyone living in them. People who live in some distant foreign land get mansions constructed back home though they may never intend to come and live here. There are ...

“Weren’t you a worm till the other day?” The plant asks the butterfly. “That’s ancient history,” the butterfly answers. “Why don’t you look at the present reality which is much more beautiful?” “How can I forget that past?” The plant insists. “You ate almost all my leaves. Had not my constant gardener discovered your ravage in time and removed you from my frail limbs, I would have been dead long before you emerged from your contemplation with beautiful wings.” “I’m sorry, my dear Nandiarvattam ji. Did I have a choice? The only purpose of the existence of caterpillars is to eat leaves. Eat and eat. Until we get into the cocoon and wait for our wings to unfold. A new reality to unfold. It's a relentless hunger that creates butterflies.” “Your new reality is my painful old history. I still remember how I trembled foreseeing my death. Death by a worm!” “I wish I could heal you with my kisses.” “You’re doing that, thank you. But…” “I know. It hurts, the history thing. I’...

This is a promotional post, let me be honest.  I've started a YouTube channel. A way to keep me busy and cheerful during the retirement that I'm opting for from March 2025. But teaching runs in my veins. So I will continue to teach for as long as I can.  My students have stopped listening in class saying that they can learn from YouTube. So I thought of shifting myself to YouTube. Let my students and anybody's students get better interpretations of lessons than what YouTube is currently providing. That's my intention.  Since students of today want everything in capsule form, I intend to present all the lessons in just ten minutes. My presentations are titled A Lesson In 10 Minutes . Above is my ten-minute lesson on the poem Keeping Quiet by Pablo Neruda. 

Is India joining the ranks of North Korea, China, and Russia when it comes to the freedom of the media? India’s rank in the World Press Freedom Index as well as many other similar indices has been declining rapidly in the recent years. The cover story of the December issue of The Caravan magazine, one of the few remaining independent journals in the country, is about how Mukesh Ambani has become the media manager of Narendra Modi. Ambani’s Reliance bought News 18 in July 2014. The year is significant. Modi had just come to power in Delhi. Eventually News 18 bought off many TV channels and journals. The Caravan informs us that using these media Modi is doing exactly what Kim Jong Un has been doing in North Korea, Putin in Russia, and Xi Jinping in China. The first major casualty, when the government takes control of the mass media, is Suppression of free speech and dissent . The Caravan reveals how scores of journalists who refused to propagate what the government wanted the...

Illustration by Copilot Designer Personally, I’m not much concerned about whether the gods are real simply because, for me, they aren’t. I can accept the mysterious nature of the cosmos, the realms that science hasn’t fathomed yet and may never, and the awe that some of it inspires in a lot of people including me. But I won’t ever find myself imagining a god that looks like a man or woman, as is the case with most of our divine entities. What will a god do with a gender, in the first place? Forget the cumbersome physical masses of their bodies which will have to obey Newton’s laws of motion in the ethereal spaces. That is why I was amused when Facebook decided to enlighten me with a booklet titled Is the Bible True ? You can download it free of charge from the site Life, Hope & Truth . It being a Sunday when life is a lot relaxed for me, I decided to explore the material which Facebook seemed to thrust into the core of my being after censoring two of my recent posts for “going...

When fellow blogger Sakshi Varma invited me join a blog-hop on the theme of disability, in connection with the International Day of Persons with Disabilities [IDPD, 3 Dec], the first person who came to my mind was Christopher Boone. Before I come to Christopher, let me tell you about Augustin (not his real name), who was my classmate in high school. Augustin’s right leg had been rendered limp due to polio in childhood. But his greatest passion was football. During the games period, he would be there on the football ground, running around as much as he could, in passionate exuberance, shouting to others what they should do, though he hardly got an opportunity to touch the ball. Whenever there was a football match, Augustin would be there on the side of the ground, holding on to the branch of a tree firmly, watching the game, with his limp leg flying in the air as if he was kicking the ball. He was engrossed totally in the game. I loved watching him rather than the game. His passion...

Liza : You are sheer humbug, Professor Higgins. You think you’re great because you have a lot of knowledge. And because you belong to the wealthy class. But I know what you are. Sheer Humbug. And I also know how to deal with you. Dear Reader, I’m writing this post for a blog hop on Rewriting the ending of a book . The character who speaks the above dialogue belongs to George Bernard Shaw’s classic play Pygmalion which Hollywood converted into an eminently successful movie, My Fair Lady . The movie did give a different ending to the play doing some injustice to Shaw. Shaw was not alive when Hollywood made the movie. He wouldn’t have liked the movie’s alternative ending simply because he was against sentimental romance. Even love was a philosophy for Shaw. He would have condemned the movie quoting Walter Savage Landor that “to those who have the greatest power of loving, love is a secondary affair.” Let me offer a different ending. For Blogchatter blog hop. Liza is ordered...

Illustration by Copilot Designer Charley wants to go back in time and live in the Galesburg of 1894. He belongs to mid-20 th century in Jack Finney’s short story, The Third Level . What triggered his longing for Galesburg of 1894 is his accidental arrival at the third level of New York Grand Central Railway station. Grand Central has only two levels. But Charley lands on a different platform which belongs to the older period. The people’s dress, the ticket counters, the gaslights, the newspaper stand, and the Currier & Ives locomotive all convince Charley that he is standing in the year of 1894. Charley’s grandfather lived in Galesburg. So Charley knows that it is a “wonderful town still, with big old frame houses, huge lawns, and tremendous trees whose branches meet overhead and roof the streets. And in 1894, summer evenings were twice as long, and people sat out on their lawn, the men smoking cigars and talking quietly, the women waving palm-leaf fans, with the fireflies all...

I’m becoming increasingly convinced that Facebook [FB] is for the brainless. No wonder why youngsters have abandoned it and taken to other media such as Instagram. FB censored the links to my blog posts twice in succession last week. The posts are innocuous. 1.      The Napalm Girl : The post is about Kim Phuc, the nine-year-old Vietnamese girl who survived one of the most brutal and absurd wars in human history. FB removed my link merely because the post contained the classical photo of the little girl running in pain. FB’s sense of morality stirred its fervent head. But FB permits utter balderdash written by scoundrels! 2.      Women and Breast Politics : This is the other post that met with FB’s idiosyncratic sense of morality. The post is about how women were made to go bare-chested in Kerala till as recently as the turn of the 20 th century. It contained a couple of pictures which I had copy-pasted from an illustrious Malayalam weekl...

Do you remember the girl in the picture below? The girl who is running naked and crying out in utter helplessness?  She is Kim Phuc . Many of you will recall this picture easily because it is a classic photo that played a role in putting an end to the prolonged Vietnam War (1955-1975). That war remains in human history as one of the most controversial and traumatic conflicts. A futile war in the name of an ideology: communism. Communists and Anti-Communists killed each other with the noble purpose of saving humanity from evils. Like most wars, this one was too a clash of egos. The ego of the capitalist USA versus the ego of the Communist USSR. Capitalism won in the end, they say. But at the cost of millions of lives. Innocent lives. Like what has been happening in Ukraine for nearly three years. In Gaza for over a year. Have you seen little children dying painfully in those countries for no mistake of theirs?   Kim Phuc was one such child in Vietnam. She was nine years o...

On the way to Kupup, Sikkim One of the greatest delights of life is travel. My whole life has been a protracted travel, in a way. I started working as soon as I graduated and the place where I managed to secure a teaching job was Shillong, 3500 km from my home. The train journey lasted nearly four days. It could extend indefinitely depending on the hartals and bandhs called by various political organisations on the way, particularly in Assam which was passing through a turbulent phase in those days. I touched seven states of India during each of those annual journeys, learnt about the politics there, and the cultures of the people. Travel isn’t about reaching your destination; it is about the journey that teaches you, transforms you. Later, as a middle-aged man, I shifted to Delhi. Again long train journeys (until our school offered to foot part of our flight bills). This time our train passed through a few other states. Apart from these annual journeys were the many trips I made...

Until a century ago, quite many women in Kerala had to go without covering their breasts because of the caste system that was in force. The latest issue of Mathrubhumi weekly [dated 1 Dec 2024] carries a few photos of some Nair women of those days. Let me reproduce two of them below.  Notice the ornaments they wear Up to the 1920s, Kerala’s women were confined to domestic roles. Their lives were regulated by their respective communities. Women belonging to Christian and Muslim communities were expected to cover their breasts while their Hindu counterparts had to leave them bare. Those women from the lower castes had no choice in this matter. However, the Nair women enjoyed a remarkable degree of autonomy because of the matrilineal system that was followed by that community, though the eldest male member known as karanavar wielded the ultimate authority. The Hindu system in those days upheld a lot of evils such as child marriage, denial of education to girls, restrictions on...

I met Ms Dhanya Ramachandran a few years ago at one of the centralised evaluation camps of CBSE. Then we met again every year for the same purpose until I retired from teaching officially. I’m not sure whether it’s her Mona Lisa smile or her commendable efficiency with the job that drew my attention more to her. Last week I came to know that Dhanya (let me take the liberty of calling her so) received an award for her contributions to the cause of education. I wished to bring her to a wider audience for the cause of education and hence requested an interview. What follows is the result. Since it is an email interview, it has its limitations. Nevertheless, Dhanya comes alive here. Over to the interview.  Tomichan : Hi Ms Dhanya Ramachandran, please introduce yourself for the sake of the readers of this blog. Dhanya : Hello. I am Dhanya Ramachandran, a passionate educator with diverse background. My career journey began in journalism, but life took me on a different path, lead...