Tomichan Matheikal's blog

A few days back, a college near my home witnessed an odd kind of disturbance on the campus. Some Muslim students, particularly girls, demanded a separate prayer room for them. The college authorities refused to consent. The college which was established more than 70 years ago belongs to a Christian management. Though the management is Christian, the college is entirely secular in its workings. Students belonging to all religious communities in the state, particularly Hindus, Christians and Muslims, have studied (and still do) in this college for over seven decades without letting their religion interfere with their academic pursuits. The recent face-off led by students of a particular religious community doesn’t augur well for a state with a high population of all the three major religions: Hindus (55%), Muslims (27%) and Christians (18%). The controversy could have become a cauldron of sectarian savagery in many other parts of the country. In Kerala, however, the Muslim leaders of...

AI-generated illustration The parish priest of my neighbourhood committed suicide this morning. His body was found hanging from the ceiling. Just a week back a Catholic nun chose to end her life in the same manner at a place about 20 km from my home. In a country where about 500 persons choose death every day, the suicide of two individuals may not create ripples, let alone waves. But, non-believer as I am, I was shaken by these deaths. Christianity is a religion that accepts suffering as a virtue. In fact, the more the suffering in your life, the better a Christian you can be. Follow the path shown by Jesus, that’s what every priest preaches from the pulpit day after day. Jesus’ path is the way of the cross. I grew up in an extremely conservative Catholic family in an equally conservative village in Kerala. I had a rather wretched childhood. But I was taught to find consolation in the sufferings of Jesus. The Passion of Jesus, that’s what it is called in Catholic theology. Tha...

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...

  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 app...

  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 ...

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...

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 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 tr...

The day ended on a sour note. I was at school. The school that I had retired from a few months back had called me back when my successor had to leave without notice for his own valid reasons. I was filling a vacuum, in short. I could sense something alien from the moment I stepped into the school. I felt like an unwanted guest. You shouldn’t return to a place from where you retired and got a grand farewell. Was that the feeling in the air? I think so. You should never return to your own vacuum. Retirement is like death. The farewell is the funeral. You shouldn’t challenge death. Least of all, your funeral. Last life’s words belong to last life’s language, if I may paraphrase T S Eliot. You need to invent the words for your new life that’s a potential threat to many who were trying to create a new lingo that has no word for you in its lexicon. You shouldn’t return to certain places ever. The classrooms weren’t as bad, however. The students are ready to try you out. Old wine can be...

  Floppy Disks Japan was probably the only country that retained the floppy disk on their computers so long. Now that country has decided to say goodbye to the floppy drive and the disk. Most people of the present young generation may not even have seen the floppy disk. When I bought my first computer, a desktop that took up quite a lot of space in the room, the floppy disk was the only way to copy data and store it or transfer it. The disk couldn’t keep much data either. I remember using floppy disks that could contain hardly 1.44 MB of data. Very often these disks would get infected either by virus or by the weather. It couldn’t withstand humidity or the heat of Delhi’s summer. It was absolutely unreliable, in short. Soon came compact disks or CDs which were far superior to the floppy disks. But copying anything on to the CD was a Herculean task which I never managed to master. It had the tremendous (tremendous in those days) capacity to hold 700 MB of data. When I got my...

  AI-generated illustration Shashi Tharoor described India the other day as a democratically elected dictatorship. He was speaking about the imminent arrest of Arundhati Roy for her remark on Kashmir. I don’t question Tharoor’s description because it’s true. In spite of the thrashing received in the last elections, Narendra Modi has refused to change his style of governing the country. He still thinks he has a divine mandate to rule India as per his whims and fancies. I have been more inclined to view the Modi government as a humongous extortionist. GST is the simple reason. Modi’s government has been collecting unjustifiable amounts in the name of GST. Let me give only a couple of personal examples. The other day I received a notification from my health insurers. It’s time to renew my policy if I wish to continue its benefits. The company doesn’t seem quite eager to have me continue it. My agent tells me that once a client turns 65, medical insurance business loses interest ...

I stood face to face with Ruskin Bond. He had his characteristic genial smile on his face. My face must have revealed a helpless inhibition which held me back from going to him and the simultaneous desire to go to him and say a Hi at least. I would have loved to have a conversation with him, however brief. That was in 2003. I had taken a student of mine from school for an award ceremony organised by ITC at the ITC Hotel in Mumbai. My student was one of the 15 prize-winners of a short story competition conducted by ITC and their newly launched brand of student-oriented products named Classmate . The awards were being presented by Ruskin Bond who would also release the story anthology. My student who won the award was a fan of Ruskin Bond. But he did not seem the least interested in meeting his favourite writer personally and getting an autograph. He was with the other prize-winners who were all imprinting autographs on one another’s white T-shirts presented to them by ITC and whic...