Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Courtesy Copilot Designer Fiction At some point in K’s narrative, I became enlightened. He’s telling the truth pretending it to be a lie. No lie can have such emotional underpinning. That realisation was my enlightenment. We were a group of nine men, all sexagenarians like me, gathered at Adithyan’s residence for an alumni get-together. We were meeting together after many years though a few of us met each other once in a while on some occasions like a wedding or a funeral. While the third round of drinks was being poured, Dominic said, “Hey, why don’t we play a small game before dinner?” Each one of us had to speak about himself for three-four minutes continuously and tell only lies. “Telling lies credibly is a political skill and a literary art,” Dominic added. We all took the game with the characteristic enthusiasm of intoxicated nostalgia. Dominic started the game on everyone’s insistence and spoke about his sleeping through a landslide that had brought down to slush almos...

Ancient India was a powerhouse of new concepts in mathematics and astronomy, asserts William Dalrymple’s new book, The Golden Road . India stood out most dramatically in scientific rather than spiritual ideas. Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, wrote in his classic Discovery of India : “It is remarkable that the Indians, though apparently detached from life, were yet intensely curious about it, and this curiosity led them to science.” Why does the present prime minister of the country choose to highlight the religious contributions? Well, you know the answer. While reading Dalrymple yesterday, I was reminded of a math prof I had for my graduation course. Baby was his first name and I can’t recall the surname. ‘Baby’ was a common name for men in Kerala of the mid-twentieth century. The present General Secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) is a 71-year-old Baby from Kerala. Our Prof Baby was a middle-aged man who knew a lot more than mathematics. One day ...

“Do you serve momos?” I asked the aging man in Monkz Café, the only stall that was open at about 11 this morning when I visited The Old Monk Food Street in my hometown of Thodupuzha. According to the omniscient Google, this is probably the only place in this town where momos are available. “What?” the man who managed everything – brewing tea/coffee, serving snacks, and collecting the cash – nearly scowled. I repeated the word ‘momo’ in singular since Malayalam has an aversion for plurals and the man’s demeanour made me defensive. He gave me a smile that was typically Malayali: mocking as well as naughty. That smile made me wonder whether the word ‘momo’ has some vulgar connotation in Malayalam. I told him to give me a dal vada and a coffee, a common order in a Malayali tea shop. As I sat in the elaborate food court which was empty except for a group of youngsters and one other client, I observed that all the stalls in the ‘food street’ remained closed. A few shutters were par...

From CNN  whose headline is:  Holy cow! India is the world's largest beef exporter The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon is perhaps the only novel I’ve read in which food plays a significant, though not central, role, particularly in deepening the reader’s understanding of Christopher Boone’s character. Christopher, the protagonist, is a 15-year-old autistic boy. [For my earlier posts on the novel, click here .] First of all, food is a symbol of order and control in the novel. Christopher’s relationship with food is governed by strict rules and routines. He likes certain foods and detests a few others. “I do not like yellow things or brown things and I do not eat yellow or brown things,” he tells us innocently. He has made up some of these likes and dislikes in order to bring some sort of order and predictability in a world that is very confusing for him. The boy’s food preferences are tied to his emotional state. If he is served a breakfast o...

Pearl Spot or Karimeen You won’t expect fish to be staple diet in a state like Rajasthan just as you don’t find millets in Kerala’s regular cuisine. Food is deeply intertwined with local cultures; it reflects history, geography, climate, religious beliefs, social structures, and economic conditions. Fish has been a regular presence on the Malayali dining table for centuries thanks to the state’s 600 km of coastline and 44 major rivers, not to mention countless rivulets and streams. My childhood reeked of sardines and mackerels, the most abundant fishes in our region. Fishmongers came on bicycles selling these two varieties usually, probably because they were the cheapest. These two varieties are becoming extinct now, I’m afraid; they are not seen much in the markets. My cats do miss them occasionally. The queen of the Malayali dinner menu is undoubtedly the pearl spot, known as karimeen in Malayalam. This fish can appear in infinite varieties on the dining table, karimeen pollic...

If you want to have a typical nonvegetarian Malayali lunch or dinner in a serene village in Kerala, here is the Garden of Eden all set for you at Ramapuram [literally ‘Abode of Rama’] in central Kerala. The place has a temple each for Rama and his three brothers: Lakshmana, Bharata, and Shatrughna. It is believed that Rama meditated in this place during his exile and also that his brothers joined him for a while. Right in the heart of the small town is a Catholic church which is an imposing structure that makes an eloquent assertion of religious identity. Quite close to all these religious places is the Garden of Eden, Eden Thoppu in Malayalam, a toddy shop with a difference. Toddy is palm wine, a mild alcoholic drink collected from palm trees. In my childhood, toddy was really natural; i.e., collected from palm trees including coconut trees which are ubiquitous in Kerala. My next-door neighbours, two brothers who lived in the same house, were toddy-tappers. Toddy was a health...

When a cousin of mine posted the following video on a WhatsApp group, my first impulse was to locate the Punjabi restaurant presented in it, merely because I love Punjabi cuisine. One of the foods I missed in the last ten years – that is, after Maggie and I left Delhi – is tandoori roti with chicken tikka masala. My first association with Punjabi food – if that can be called so – is the Patiala peg that I was served when I was in Shillong. A friend who wanted to see me inebriated too quickly for his own reasons told me that he was going to pour me a Patiala peg. I was familiar with the largeness of Punjabi kurta-pyjamas. Later Maggie would teach me about the enormous size of Patiala pants for ladies, which a friend of mine nicknamed Elephant’s trousers.   When Maggie and I settled down in Delhi, we came across many Punjabi people including students, and the first thing we noticed was the largeness of their hearts. Yes, there’s something big about everything that is Punjabi, e...

Book Review    Title: Heart Lamp: Selected Stories Author: Banu Mushtaq Translator: Deepa Bhasthi Publisher: Penguin Books, 2025 Pages: 216   The short stories in this slim volume that won the International Booker Prize 2025 present the voice of the voiceless women among the Muslims of Karnataka. The essential beauty of these stories lies in the way the inner rage of the women-characters is presented: quietly. The rage never becomes a blazing flame; it remains there within the character as a fraught flicker – as a yearning in some stories, helplessness in some others, and painful empathy in a few. Gender and patriarchy in conservative Muslim families, the tensions between restrictive tradition and personal freedom, and the complex emotional landscapes of women who are caught in a socio-religious system that may horrify people who are not acquainted with it – these are the themes in general. Every single character in these twelve stories is as real as t...

I have a friend who is a jack of all trades. He can double up as a plumber or electrician or carpenter, almost anything, when required. I rely on him frequently for many of my simple domestic repairs, the latest being changing a toilet seat cover yesterday. “Keep it,” he said pointing at the old seat cover which I was going to dump among the plastic waste that will be carried away by one of the many men who come by regularly collecting such recyclable scrap materials. “What!” I exclaimed in spite of knowing his proclivity for keeping anything and everything on the basis of a simple philosophy: nothing is waste, everything becomes handy some time or other . “I mean those nuts and bolts,” he clarified. “We’ll buy new ones when required,” I retorted. Suchita Agarwal of Team Blogchatter reminded me yesterday that today is the World Environment Day. Below is Blogchatter’s suggestion for adding value to the Day.  My friend mentioned above will have a whole truckful of thing...

India's Armed Forces hunting the Maoists Recently India, particularly the media, celebrated two events: (1) the success of Operation Sindoor which was a quasi-war on Pakistan, and (2) the killing of the Maoist chief Nambala Keshava Rao and 27 of his warriors. Personally, I felt uneasy about both the celebrations. Neither of them is a victory, something within me kept whispering to me. They are both tragedies masquerading as victories in the history being fabricated by certain vested interests. The truths about the Pak affair will come to light only much later. Perhaps, they may never see the light of day. This post is going to look at the second affair. With the killing of the Maoists, especially its Supremo, Maoism in India is all set for its last rites. That is what excited the Indian media. I didn’t come across any TV channel or other significant media agency that probed the reality from the perspective of the Maoists. I hasten to add that I don’t endorse any kind of vio...

Illustration by Gemini AI “Do I dare disturb the algorithm?” T S Eliot’s Prufrock would have asked were he living today. But Eliot lived almost a century back (1888-1965). His best poems were written in the early twentieth century. The persona of J Alfred Prufrock has remained with me from the time I read the poem first in my late twenties. Wasn’t there something of Prufrock in me? Was that the reason the character stayed with me for a long, very long period? Prufrock was quite an ordinary person, at least outwardly. But within him raged a storm of uncertainty, fear, and longing. Maybe I didn’t share the depth of his introspection. But I did share his painful awareness of his own inadequacy. He was very unsure of what he should do as well as how others perceive him. His life was marked by inaction, overthinking, and a fear of judgment. He does move in social circles such as tea parties “where women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo.” He is unable to join in the conversation...