Tomichan Matheikal's blog

“As I grow older, I discard one after another of my masks; but when, having discarded the last, the world sees my unknown features, I doubt whether a single cry of terror will be raised!” This is what Jerome tells his wife Gabrielle in Francois Mauriac’s short story, A Man of Letters . The story is a profound exploration of human love and relationships, particularly conjugal love. Husband-wife relationship demands a lot more understanding and compromises than any other relationship. Living together for years will result in knowing each other too well, warts and all. Can you accept all that you see in your partner? How much compromise are you willing to make? Or, can you rise to the level of God? The narrator of Mauriac’s story says that “It is God’s omniscience that helps Him to endure the sorrows of the world.” If we know everything about a person, we cannot but love him/her. But knowing any person that well is not quite possible. People wear masks to conceal their ugly aspects,...

My copy of Great Expectations Charles Dickens does not appear in the list of my favourite novelists, notwithstanding the fact that he is an admirable story-teller. He weaves fantastic plots with too much happening at any time. There are all sorts of characters in his works. There is no dearth of melodrama and sentiments, and even the grotesque. In spite of all that, Dickens remains at a considerable distance from my affections. I think the problem is that his characters become conventional mouthpieces of conventional sentiments when confronted with crises. Pip, the protagonist of Great Expectations , has remained with me for a long time. He has made some sort of an indelible impression on my fancy. His real name is Philip Pirrip but is known as Pip throughout the novel. Right in the first pages of the novel, we meet Pip as a little boy in the local cemetery where his parents are buried. As he is wandering about there, he is caught by “a fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great...

Illustration by ChatGPT Evil has a peculiar charm, a charm which seems to belong to an alien world. But somewhere deep in our hearts we know that it is our own world, not an alien world. We romanticise it as Lost Paradise, Rama Rajya, Utopia, or whatever. That ‘romance’ is what I love about Emily Bronte’s novel, Wuthering Heights . Emily died at the age of 29. Most Romantics died young. But those Romantics like Keats and Shelley imagined beautiful worlds and died because their souls knew that such beautiful worlds were impossible. Emily was born just three years before Keats died and four years before Shelley followed Keats. But the literary age was changing to the more prudish Victorian morality as Emily grew up. Victorian morality was more than prudish. Women were supposed to be the western counterparts of India’s Satis, women who immolated themselves on their husbands’ funeral pyres. How could a woman like Emily Bronte, daughter of a Christian parson, born and brought up in a ...

I realise that I’m becoming utterly lazy these days especially when it comes to writing. Even reading. Earlier, I used to blog almost daily. Then it became an alternate-day affair, then twice a week, and now there’s no order whatever. Similarly, I spend less time on reading too. So, I have decided to give a kick to myself and rouse my spirit up. That’s why I’m joining Blogchatter’s exercise called Half Marathon. It begins tomorrow. Ten posts in 15 days is all what it demands. Fairly easy, if not a child’s game. But the problem is when you’re nearly a burnt-out case. Have you read that novel, by the way: Graham Greene’s A Burnt-Out Case [1961]? It’s worth your time. The novel tells the story of Querry, famous architect, who loses interest in life. He quits and lands in a leper colony in Congo which is looked after by some Catholic missionaries. He is diagnosed by Dr Colin, an atheist doctor, as the medical equivalent of a ‘burnt-out case’: a leper who has gone through the stages...

The last of my maternal uncles breathed his last yesterday. A cousin of mine has been tethered to a ventilator today after a fall. The uncle was 93. The cousin must be around 80. I am 64. I have lived twice as long as an average Indian of 1947. When India wrested independence from the British, the average life expectancy of an Indian was 32. Today the average life expectancy in India is 70 years, according to Macrotrends. My uncle, who was a teacher by profession, defied the national statistics. My cousin, who is a nun, is being assisted by one of the innumerable multi-speciality hospitals in Kerala to keep going and defy the national statistics. Would she want to keep going? My inextricable perversion raises that question merely because I have always had a soft corner for her. She is a tender person. Someone who believes that love is the only purpose of human existence. She wouldn’t do anything that would give even the littlest trouble to others. I felt sorry for her when I was ...

Fiction  She looked so emaciated that I would have mistaken her for a beggar. But she had said, “Hi Tom.” There was no way a beggar would know my name since I was not a politician or any such public figure that appears in the media. Moreover, her dress, a simple but elegant churidar suit, bore the fading shades of some bygone aristocracy. I stared into her eyes, deep and stagnant pools of grief, which reflected a different me, a young me.   “Mercy!” I cried. “Yes,” she said. And she smiled like a moonbeam trying to pierce the winter fog of a terribly polluted city-sky. We were both sitting in a park in the horizon of which the sun was sinking rapidly into the Arabian Ocean beyond the trees in the park. An old man with grey hairs all over his head and face: that’s me. And an old woman with grey hairs that seemed to be lingering on out of some sympathy. That was Mercy. Mercy and I were classmates at college. She was a brilliant student who could solve all the problems ...

  Quadratic Formula You must have studied the quadratic formula in high school and used it for solving umpteen quadratic equations. Have you ever used it at any time after your school education? How much of what you learnt in school or college has been useful or relevant in your practical life so far? The answer to the first question must be No unless you are a math teacher or in some profession related to math. The answer to the second question must be: Not much. I’m currently a reading a book on education written by Vardan Kabra, cofounder of a reputed school in Gujarat. The book, Reimagining Indian Education , begins with the following pop quiz.  Well, I’m sure you flunked that test. I did too. The only question I could answer correctly was the last one. I could do that because I began my teaching career as a math teacher and I was in love with quadratic equations. Why did we learn what we did at school if 90% of all that stuff never came in handy in our practical lif...

Book Review Title: Being Muslim in Hindu India: A critical view Author: Ziya Us Salam Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2023 Pages: 313 The greatest disservice that Narendra Modi has done to India is to divide the country into two sects: Hindus versus the rest, particularly Muslims. There are concerted efforts to strip the Muslims of their very citizenship. The Muslims have been victimised in many ways. Their food is blocked, their dress-choice is questioned, their jobs are made illegal, their history is distorted, their places of worship are attacked, their residences are bulldozed… This book takes a hard look at these painful truths. The book is divided into seven parts with 30 chapters in all. The titles of the seven parts will give you a clear and comprehensive idea about the contents of the book: Political Marginalization; Rubbishing Medieval History; Kill a Muslim a Day; Wrath on Houses of Worship; Matters of Love, the Jamaat and the Hijab; Looks and Beyond; and Find...

  Fiction  “Alleluia Alleluia...” Anna shouted along with the hundreds of devotees attending the night vigil.   The Alleluia cries were interspersed with ‘Praise the Lord’ and ‘Amen’ shouts too. In the background was permissibly highest decibel music that violently struck the indigestion in your innards. Right in front of the altar was a priest in white cassock who behaved like a prestidigitator clapping hands, shouting verses from the Bible mentioning the chapter and verse, and asking the devotees to shed their sins. “Come on, Joe, Mary, Tessy, Mathew… look into your hearts and see the darkness of the sins you’ve committed.” The priest, Rev Fr Joseph Thonnivasathil VD, was shouting through his collar mike. In spite of all that commotion, Annamma heard the vibration of her mobile phone in her entrails. So palpable was the vibration that she thought the call must be from Jomon, her husband, though that was quite unlikely because Jomon was the lead singer in Rev Fr Thon...

Alice Munro must be a great writer. She is a Nobel laureate in literature. I haven’t read her. My job and other life-related issues force me to limit my reading choices. That’s why I haven’t read Munro yet. Not because she was complicit in a paedophile case. Did she let her second husband sexually abuse her daughter from her first husband? The daughter has raised this charge which is prima facie true. The latest issue of Outlook is dedicated to Munro and the new controversy. Having read a few pages, most of which is too philosophical or literary to be of much interest to me in spite of my normal tolerance of philosophy and love of literature, I started thinking about the issue that Outlook is raising. Should you read a writer who has committed serious mistakes in his/her life? How authentic is such a writer’s writing? The editorial states the answer explicitly: “ Munro wasn’t telling us how to live. She was telling us how we live .”   The answer to my problem lies there i...

Book Review Title: Being Hindu in Bangladesh Authors: Deep Halder & Avishek Biswas Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2023 Pages: 178 S heikh Hasina has abandoned her country after having been its longest-serving Prime Minister. She was the country’s PM for more than 20 years. In fact, she was the world’s longest-serving female Head of Government in history. Yet she had to save herself by running away from her own country. She has sought temporary asylum in India. Sheikh Hasina tried to foster secularism in her country. It couldn’t ever have been an easy task given the presence of Islamic militancy all around. Secularism longed to get rooted in that soil right from the time of her father Sheikh Mujibur Rahman who declared that: “This is not the land of Muslims. This is not the land of Hindus. This is everybody’s land.” Mujibur Rahman wanted Bangladesh to be everybody’s land. He even went to the extent of forgiving his enemies and allowing them to return from Pakistan t...

A 24-year-old Malayalam song gained much attention in Kerala in the past weeks. It is a prayer to God not to come to certain places such as libraries, playgrounds, educational institutions, hospitals, farms, factories, courts of justice, corridors of political power, and a lot more. “Don’t you have enough places of worship to stay?” The song asks God. “We have given you our hearts too for residing. Yet why do you choose to come to the other places as a murderous rage?” Many newspapers reported yesterday about the disappearance of the Preamble to India’s Constitution from the new NCERT textbooks. It is not surprising that the Modi government has chosen to remove the Preamble from schools and many other places. Modi was quite discontented with the word ‘secularist’ in the Preamble right from the time he worked in a non-existent tea stall in Vadnagar railway station. [Despite the fact that the word ‘secularist’ appeared in India’s Constitution for the first time when Modi was 26 years...

  Vladimir and Estragon as imagined by AI I have never written about my friends. Probably because they have been quite as weird as I am. Or maybe because I never knew how to establish deep bonds with anyone. Whenever I think of my friends or friendship in general, the first thing that comes to mind is the conversation between Samuel Beckett’s unforgettable duo. Here’s the conversation that has remained in my heart for over four decades, getting better with age like fine wine and occasionally leaving me with a hangover: Estragon: Don’t touch me! Don’t question me! Don’t speak to me! Stay with me! Vladimir: Did I ever leave you? Estragon: You let me go. Some of my best friends are like Vladimir. I am Estragon anyway. I don’t like anyone getting too close to me – physically, verbally, or emotionally. Keep a safe distance. I’m fragile. A strong hold can break me. And so Vladimir lets me go; what else can he do? But that’s not what I want! It’s funny when I think of friends....

AI-generated illustration John Henry Newman [known more popularly as Cardinal Newman and the author of the famous hymn Lead Kindly Light ] said, “Fear not that your life shall come to an end, rather fear that it will never have beginning.” Too many people don’t live at all, or live very incomplete lives. They exist, not live. Psychologists tell us that most of us make use of a tiny fraction of our potential, as little as 10%. What happens to the remaining 90% of our potential? It is wasted. It’s just not discovered! There is no limit to our potential. Our brain can continue to grow and change for our entire lives. For all the tremendous progress that mankind has been making over centuries, the bare truth is that it is all made by a few individuals who put their potential to good use. A huge chunk of the human population has only been the beneficiaries of the achievements made by the tiny minority. The saddest fact is that the majority who make little contribution to the progress ...