Tomichan Matheikal's blog

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...

Book Review Title: Why do you fear my way so much? Author: G N Saibaba Publisher: Speaking Tiger, New Delhi, 2022 Pages: 216 G N Saibaba breathed his last on 12 Oct 2024 at the age of 57. It may be more correct to say that he was killed by the government of his country just as Rev Stan Swamy and a lot many others were. Stan Swamy was an octogenarian, suffering from severe Parkinson’s disease and other ailments, when he was arrested under the draconian UAPA. He died in prison at the age of 84 labelled by his government as a traitor. G N Saibaba was a professor of English in Delhi University when he was arrested in 2014 under UAPA for alleged links with treasonous Maoist groups. Polio had rendered him absolutely incapable of free movement right from childhood. The prison authorities deprived him even of his wheelchair, making life incredibly brutal for him in the Anda cell of Nagpur Central Prison. The egg-shaped cell (‘anda’ means egg in India’s putative national language) i...

Disclaimer: A friend tells me this flower is Kalyana Saugandhikam (garland lily) and not Nishagandhi.  Finally one of my Nishagandhis has bloomed. Here’s the picture.  I have four pots of this plant which is quite exotic as its very name implies. Belonging to the Cactaceae family, this flower goes by different names. The Indian name ‘Nishagandhi’ comes from two Sanskrit words: nisha = night & gandh: fragrance. This flower blooms in the night and wilts as dawn breaks. I took the above pic just before sunrise this morning. I have waited for nearly half a year now for this blossoming. It’s not easy to get these flowers which have a divine touch. It is known as Brahma Kamala, Bethlehem Lily, and the flower of healing. The Chinese consider the Nishagandhi flower to be lucky. I consider it as cosmic flower. The Nishagandhi has many medicinal properties. Ayurveda uses it for treating diabetes, breathing disorders, throat infections, digestive problems, and so on. Of course,...

India has no national language because the country has too many languages. Apart from the officially recognised 22 languages are the hundreds of regional languages and dialects. It would be preposterous to imagine one particular language as the national language in such a situation. That is why the visionary leaders of Independent India decided upon a three-language policy for most purposes: Hindi, English, and the local language. The other day two pranksters from the Hindi belt landed in Bengaluru airport wearing T-shirts declaring Hindi as the national language. They posted a picture on X and it evoked angry responses from a lot of Indians who don’t speak Hindi.  The worthiness of Hindi to be India’s national language was debated umpteen times and there is nothing new to add to all that verbiage. Yet it seems a reminder is in good place now for the likes of the above puerile young men. Language is a power-tool . One of the first things done by colonisers and conquerors is...

They say that childhood is the best phase of one’s life. I sigh. And then I laugh. I wish I could laugh raucously. But my voice was snuffed out long ago. By the conservatism of the family. By the ignorance of the religious people who controlled the family. By educators who were puppets of the system fabricated by religion mostly and ignorant but self-important politicians for the rest. I laugh even if you can’t hear the sound of my laughter. You can’t hear the raucousness of my laughter because I have been civilised by the same system that smothered my childhood with soft tales about heaven and hell, about gods and devils, about the non sequiturs of life which were projected as great. I lost my childhood in the 1960s. My childhood belonged to a period of profound social, cultural and political change. All over the world. But global changes took time to reach my village in Kerala, India. India was going through severe crises when I was struggling to grow up in a country where ...

Herbert Marcuse introduced the concept of one-dimensional existence, back in 1964. A one-dimensional person is a product of consumerism, technology, and conformist ideologies. One-dimensional people are happy with material comforts and superficial freedoms. They are rendered incapable of critical thinking, creativity, and authentic individuality. Hence they fail to see the system’s fault lines and injustices. In fact, the creators of the system make the society appear so efficient and materially fulfilling that all opposition succumbs to a natural death. The system creates the people’s needs through the media, propaganda of all sorts, advertisements and a mass culture. Probably, Marcuse’s concept is more relevant today than in 1960s. How else would we explain the victories of our present-day leaders, the latest being Donald Trump’s. Why would a nation like the United States of America elect a man like Donald Trump as its president? As Ali Chougule writes in today’s Free Press Jou...

Aroon Purie, editor of India Today , thinks that Trump owes his victory to such issues as price rise, housing crisis, influx of immigrants, and the conservative rebellion against elite wokeism. Trump presidency portends populism, nativism, isolationism, and protectionism, says Purie quoting Condoleeza Rice. The world may not be a happier place with Trump leading America. “What is the world according to Trump?” India Today ’s senior journalist Raj Chengappa asks. His answer: “… it is ensuring America’s interests first with those of every other nation coming a very distant second.” Trump thinks that hitherto the other nations were eating America’s lunch. The allusion is not only to the immigrants but also to America “paying everyone else’s bills to maintain the global order.” Though Trump would like to play a key role in bringing the two wars [Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Gaza] to an end, he will not do anything that will involve a price tag that the US has to pay for. Chengappa worri...

Gustavo Gutierrez [1928-2024] Obituary What good is religion if it does not make the world a better place, a place of more light and less darkness, more love and compassion, more goodness? A Catholic priest who asked this question and then went on to bring a paradigmatic change to his religion passed away on 22 Oct 2024 at the age of 96. I came to know about his demise only today. The Indian media didn’t think it worth reporting his death. But a Malayalam weekly, Mathrubhoomi , carried an obituary in its latest edition which I happened to read today. Rev Gustavo Gutierrez was the founder of what came to be known as Liberation Theology in the 1960s and 70s in Latin America. I heard about it in 1980s. Gutierrez’s theology was an attempt to interpret Christianity through the lens of social justice. He was a Peruvian, a priest in a country whose poor people were highly exploited and oppressed. The Mathrubhoomi obituary informs me that Gutierrez was inspired by a passage in a novel b...

A Catholic priest-friend of mine sent me a copy of the special edition of the Time magazine.  The entire issue is on Jesus. Apart from essays written by eminent writers, there are numerous photographs related to Jesus like the ones below.  Most of the essays present Jesus as seen by his religious believers. The very first one, titled ‘Who Was Jesus?’, starts with a ‘discovery’ made in June 2024. During a routine digitisation at Humboldt University in Hamburg, researchers discovered a scrap of papyrus with 13 lines of Ancient Greek. They were able to identify some of the words: Jesus, crowing, branch, etc. It was the earliest physical copy of a narrative called the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. Jesus is 5 years old in this gospel. The child has just moulded 12 sparrows out of clay sitting by a river. His father, Joseph, finds him and scolds him for working on the Sabbath. Jesus then claps his hands and tells the sparrows to go away. “The sparrows took flight and went away chirpi...