Tomichan Matheikal's blog

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation...

Book Review Title: From Manjunath to Manjamma Authors: B Manjamma Jogathi with Harsha Bhat Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2023 Pages: 171 I had an aversion towards the transgender people I met on the trains during my frequent travels as a younger man. These people came across as rude and vulgar. They would enter the train compartment in a large group, clapping hands loudly, waking up sleeping passengers and insisting on being given generous alms. They would go to the extent of hectoring the passengers, even making physical intrusions like poking and caressing body parts that we won’t let strangers touch. Reading Arundhati Roy’s novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness , a few years ago, made me look at transpersons with some empathy. Anjum, the transperson protagonist, is also a Muslim. Double alienation. Anjum is an undesirable citizen of the country by virtue of being a transperson who is also a Muslim. She is pushed out of the mainstream literally and driven to living i...

Anjana Alphons George I wanted this to be a guest post from a former student. However, getting this poem from Anjana Alphons George wasn’t quite easy. So this is going to be a hybrid of the guest and the host coming together like the waves and the intertidal zone in the ocean. “I’ve become your fan,” I said to Anjana. She was in grade 10. I wasn’t teaching her since my classes were confined to grades 11 and 12. It was a few years back. Anjana had delivered a speech in the weekly morning assembly. Her speech was entirely different from all the speeches of students I had ever listened to. It sounded impromptu. It carried feelings from the heart. Convictions, rather. It was motivational. Inspiring. It moved goosebumps on my skin. “Your speech was splendid,” I told her when I met her on the corridor later in the day. She became my student in grades 11 and 12 and I watched her grow up into intellectual and emotional maturity. When I asked her to write a guest post on my blog, I ha...

Book Review I read this book purely by chance. R K Narayan is not a writer whom I would choose for any reason whatever. He is too simple, simplistic. I was at school on Saturday last and I suddenly found myself without anything to do though I was on duty. Some duties are like that: like a traffic policeman’s duty on a road without any traffic! So I went up to the school library and picked up a book which looked clean. It happened to be Waiting for the Mahatma by R K Narayan. A small book of 200 pages which I almost finished reading on the same day. The novel was originally published in 1955, written probably as a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi and India’s struggle for independence. The edition that I read is a later reprint by Penguin Classics. Twenty-year-old Sriram is the protagonist though Gandhi towers above everybody else in the novel just as he did in India of the independence-struggle years. Sriram who lives with his grandmother inherits significant wealth when he turns 20. Hi...

“Do we need a government at all?” That was my introductory question in a class on Vikram Seth’s poem The Tale of Melon City . I intended to provoke my self-conceited students into some shape of wokeness. The only time their consciousness seems to awake is when they can detect some error in my pronunciation because a few of these students lived in some English-speaking country including America for a brief period and hence think they know English better than anyone in India. Interestingly, every time they question my pronunciation, I google it and prove to them that I am right. My ego! The class becomes a battleground of egos in spite of my age. I am a middling sexagenarian. So, one day I decided to put an end to the ego battle and apologised to my students for being their teacher. I didn’t deserve to be their teacher, I told them. Forgive me for the grave error of having accepted the offer from the school management to teach you. Just a few more weeks. I cannot dishonour the contra...

Book Review   Title: Gandhi: A Life in Three Campaigns Author: M J Akbar Publisher: Bloomsbury, 2023 Pages: 250 You can love this man or hate him, but you cannot ignore him. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi is the man, aka the Mahatma. The amount of hatred that is spewed on social media day after day, after Mr Modi became the Prime Minister of India, is simply stounding. Right now there is a social media campaign going on to get Mahatma Gandhi’s picture removed from the country’s currency notes. It is possible that Narendra Modi’s picture will replace the Mahatma’s sooner than any sane Indian would expect. In such a context, yet another biography of the Mahatma is not out of place. This biography is written by a man who was inducted into the Union Council of Ministers by no less a personage than Narendra Modi himself. M J Akbar was an eminent journalist before he chose to join Modi’s cabinet for reasons known only to him. The regal association ended when a charge of sexua...

Festivals ceased to charm me once I grew out of childhood. Crowds are the souls of festivals and I detest crowds. A crowd doesn’t have a mind. It is a leviathan full of passion and energy. All brawn and no brain. All too often I am driven to the conclusion that festivals are so popular precisely because they don’t require anyone to think anything worthwhile and people don’t like to think. There is one festival, however, that I have always looked forward to with good cheer. Onam. Onam is a fairly long festival. The celebrations run over weeks. Flowers and music are the souls of this festival. No pollutions. Kerala and its people celebrated Onam just a month back with all its traditional art, music and cultural richness. Pookkalam (floral rangoli) is the first thing that will come to the mind of anyone who has seen Onam celebrations. It is an intricate floral design assumed to be a colourful and gentle carpet meant to welcome Mahabali, the hero of Onam. More about him later. Boa...

Sophie as imagined by Copilot Designer Going Places is a short story by A R Barton prescribed for grade 12 students of a Central Education Board in India (CBSE). Sophie, the young protagonist, is just completing her school and will soon be working in a biscuit factory near her home as most girls of her socioeconomic class usually do. Sophie doesn’t want that future, though. She has big dreams. She wants to open a boutique, or become an actress, or be a fashion designer. She is in love with Danny Casey, the national football champion, and believes that he reciprocates the love. She believes that her fantasies about her meeting Danny in the arcade are real. Her father who is very practical and realistic has only contempt for Sophie’s fantasies. “One of these days you’re going to talk yourself into a load of trouble,” he warns his dreamer-daughter. The father is a traditional patriarch who works hard to get the family moving from day to day. He can be rough and blunt. He doesn’t know a...

One page from the comic book Who would have imagined that T S Eliot’s convoluted poem, The Waste Land , would one day be a comic book? I was fascinated when I came to know about it from an article in Open Culture . The sample pages reproduced in the article look charming too. My first association with The Waste Land was as a postgraduate student of English literature. The imageries and motifs of the poem caught my fancy. But I’m not sure I understood its deep intricacies. The sluggish resistance to life in the opening lines shakes your very roots, “stirring dull roots with spring rain.” We don’t want to be reborn. We are happy with our hibernation. It’s a sort of spiritual hibernation. We need a reawakening. That’s what the poem is leading you to. Eliot was shaken by the disillusionment that descended on the world after the World War I. There was untold devastation which went on to exert profound impact on society, culture, and art. The war shattered the belief in progress, rat...

India’s Prime Minister has promised to make the country a $5-trillion economy by 2027. My knowledge of economics is zilch. Even if I try to learn it, I don’t think I will understand. For example, economists will take the total assets of Mukesh Ambani and mine, calculate the average, and say that my average assets amount to $52 billion, half of Ambani’s $104 billion. Mukesh Ambani’s assets amount to INR 87,31,75,68,00,000. I don’t even know how to count that figure, let alone calculate the average. Even if you find the average of that and my assets [ridiculous suggestion?] and tell me, still the figure will remain beyond my grasp (both literally and metaphorically). [Black monies don’t count in economic stats, I guess.] But India may become a $5-trillion economy by 2027. Because, as I understand, the average assets of each Indian are calculated the way I described in simplistic terms above. If you google India’s skewed economy , you will understand better what I’m saying. Here is a ...

Courtesy ChatGPT A friend of mine forwarded a WhatsApp message the other day. It did make me laugh. I love jokes that can really make me laugh even if they are the most basic sort, the pun-based ones. Puns are generally kiddish. But sometimes they can be super-intelligent too. Like some of the jokes forwarded by this friend. Taste a few: I think I’m becoming a social vegan… I’m avoiding meets. I married my wife for her looks. Just not the ones she’s been giving me of late. What do you call a bedpan in Russia? A Poo-tin. One of these punny funnies prompted me to make a micro-story from two points of view: the male and the female. Male chauvinist and feminist, right? Story 1 My wife returned from a biblical convention. The first thing she did was to give me a sweet hug. Reason? The preacher had said, “You should embrace your mistakes.” Story 2 My wife returned from a biblical convention. She decided to give me some good counsel. “You should embrace your mistakes,” she s...

Book Review Title: Solovyov and Larionov Author: Eugene Vodolazkin Translator: Lisa C Hayden Publisher: OneWorld, London, 2018 Pages: 404 H ow factual is any historical discourse? How much truth do you expect from history books? I live in a country whose government has simply erased the history of a whole era, the three-century long Mughal reign – from the history textbooks given to school students. Some of the heroes of the freedom struggle are being villainised and vice-versa. Whose history will you trust: Ramachandra Guha’s or Hitesh Shankar’s? If the lion and the deer write the history of the same period in the same forest, which history will be credible to you? The subjectivity of history is the most fundamental theme of Russian writer Eugene Vodolazkin’s 2009 novel [translated into English in 2018], Solovyov and Larionov . History is a compilation of the writer’s perspectives, obscured by time and personal biases. History is like literature to some extent. But lit...

“Who created you?” I was asked by the catechism teacher in the Sunday class of the parish church when I was a kid of 6 or 7 years old. Like any other Catholic contemporary of mine I answered as mechanically as an android of today: “God created me.” That was the very first question of the catechism book in those days. All of us Catholic children had to memorise quite a few dozen such questions. It was followed by: “Why did God create you?” Android’s answer: “In order to know, love and serve God so that we will live with Him in the end.” It went on and on though I don’t remember any question beyond those two. I was reminded of that “little catechism” (as the question-answer booklet was known) this afternoon when a colleague of mine – the young physics teacher who found a mention in this very space a few days ago – narrated his experience in grade 12 (17-year-olds, not kids).   He was speaking about the Big Bang in the class in the context of nuclear fusion and fission. He to...