Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Illustration by Copilot Designer India’s New Education Policy [NEP 2020] lays much emphasis on what it calls Indian Knowledge Systems [IKS]. It refers to the integration of traditional Indian wisdom, including Vedic mathematics, Ayurveda, and ancient science and arts, into modern education. While some of that ‘ancient’ wisdom may be relevant today and some may be innocuous, much of that won’t do any good other than give us a hollow sense of pride in the antiqueness of our history. That sort of pride is as useful as one’s hope to have calluses in his backside because his great-great grandfather used to ride on an elephant’s back. The most striking irony about NEP 2020 is the emphasis laid on Sanskrit . Sanskrit was deemed to be the divine language in ancient India and only the upper caste people were allowed to study it. If a lower caste person even happens to hear Sanskrit literature being recited, that person’s ears were to be damaged forever by pouring molten lead into them. Now,...

  I’m retiring from teaching for the third time now. 28 Feb 2025 will be my last day at the present school from where I retired twice earlier. The first time was just a formality because when I completed the official age for retirement the school gave me a formal farewell and then shifted my name to another ledger in the account books. Nothing changed really other than the remuneration method. My second retirement was at the end of the last academic session in March 2024 when I decided that I was growing too grotesque for the contemporary teenagers. My young students called it ‘generation gap.’ They assumed that I belonged to the library shelf of the musty volumes of Britannica Encyclopaedia while they belonged to YouTube . They didn’t know that I had a YouTube video in which my cat was an emergent hero. And that there were a few more serious videos too which didn’t get much traction because the youngsters for whom it was meant thought that I belonged to the generation which ...

Book Review Title: A Maverick in Politics Author: Mani Shankar Aiyar Publisher: Juggernaut, New Delhi, 2024 Pages: 410 A politician’s memoirs will be intertwined with the history of his country. Mani Shankar Aiyar’s book is no exception. This is the second part of the author’s memoirs and it deals with the years from 1991 to 2024. The very opening sentence reassures you that this is a continuation from the last book: “I returned to Delhi elated and triumphant to find two sets of invitations to dinner from the two rival contestants for the leadership of the Congress party.” The first few chapters describe what Aiyar did as an MP both in his constituency and in the parliament as well as wherever he was given responsibilities. His proximity to Rajiv Gandhi had given him an edge over many other Congressmen, and Sonia Gandhi gave him many important duties especially attending meetings and other programmes abroad. After all, Aiyar was in the Indian Foreign Service before quitti...

The International Mother Language Day falls in Feb. My blogger-friends, Manali Desai and Sukaina Majeed , have chosen a theme related to IMLD for their Feb’s blog hop. I thought it’s a good opportunity to write about my mother language, Malayalam, which has quite a fascinating and potentially controversial history. The history of Malayalam is linked with that of Tamil, of the Brahmin migration from North India to the South, and the subsequent influence of Sanskrit.   The origins Malayalam originated from ancient Tamil, which was the primary language spoken in southern parts of India, particularly in the region that encompasses modern-day Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Over time, Malayalam evolved as a distinct language due to geographical, cultural, and political factors. Malayalam belongs to the Dravidian language family along with Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Tulu. It emerged as a separate language around the 9 th -13 th centuries CE, though its linguistic roots can be traced ba...

Courtesy Here If God is with you, you needn’t fear anything. I was taught that in my childhood. That was a paraphrase of what Saint Paul wrote to Romans (8:31): “If God is for us, who can be against us?” I was reminded of that when I read about Madho Sing II, King of Jaipur, this afternoon. Madho Singh received an invitation to the coronation ceremony of King Edward VII (1902). But good Hindus don’t travel across the ocean. Crossing the ocean meant mingling with all sorts of people and thus losing your racial and caste supremacy or purity or whatever. But Madho Singh wanted to attend the coronation if only to please King Edward. Also to see London along with his entire family. Find a solution, he ordered the royal priests. After all, when the problem is related to your religion, the priests are the right people to find the solution. And find they did. Tell the people of the country that their favourite god Sri Gopalji wishes to visit England. Gods have no canonical barriers. Th...

Paracetamol kills more people annually than plane crashes. A medical practitioner as well as academic, Dr C Aravinda, tells us that. The doc has written an article titled, ‘Over the counter, under the radar: can paracetamol be fatal?’ in the very first volume of Surf&Dive , a new publication from The Hindu . The article says that in the USA alone, paracetamol accounts for more than 60,000 emergency hospital visits annually and over 500 deaths. He draws a contrast between those figures and the 229 deaths that happened globally due to aviation accidents in 2023. The number of people killed by paracetamol globally every year will be many times more than the figure quoted above. There is no sufficient data available from other continents and hence we don’t know how many are killed by paracetamol there, let alone the victims of other medicines. Are our hospitals killers? I wouldn’t, of course, go to the extent of asserting that much. I have depended on the hospitals many times tho...

Dashrath Manjhi My country is completing 75 years of its being a republic. I’ve been asked to deliver a short speech in the morning assembly of my school on the occasion. How to speak to young students on a political topic? I expressed my concern to a colleague who then asked me what being a republic actually means. Isn’t independence enough? That was enough for me to get the stuff for my speech. Independence or freedom is dangerous without duties and responsibilities. The Constitution brings us those duties and responsibilities while also guaranteeing us the security we require as citizens. Liberty, fraternity, equality, justice, freedom to worship whichever god you like… No, I can’t speak on those things to school students. So, I contemplated a while… and remembered Dashrath Manjhi. In 1959, a poor young woman died in a remote village in Bihar. She had had a fall on the mountainside where she lived with her husband, Dashrath Manjhi, a poor tribesman. Dashrath wanted to save h...

Neeti Nair Book Discussion The epigraph of Neeti Nair’s book, Hurt Sentiment [see previous two posts for more on the book, links below], is a quote from Pakistani poet Fahmida Riaz (1946-2018).             In the past I used to think with sadness             today I laughed a lot as I thought             you turned out exactly like us             we were not two nations, brother! ‘We’ refer to Pakistan and India. India has now become a Hindu Pakistan with a Hindu Jinnah as prime minister. It is said that we tend to become like our enemies. The Hindu Jinnah’s India has proved that even nations can become like their enemies. Neeti Nair’s book has only four chapters plus an introduction and an epilogue. I discussed the first two chapters in the last two pos...

Book Discussion The Indian National Congress Party is repeatedly accused of Muslim appeasement by Narendra Modi and his followers. Did the Congress appease Muslims more than it did the Hindus? Neeti Nair deals with that question in the second chapter of her book, Hurt Sentiments , which I introduced in my previous post: The Triumph of Godse . The first instance of a book being banned in India occurred as an effort to placate a religious community. That was in 1955. It was done by none other than the first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru. The book was Aubrey Menen’s retelling of The Ramayana . Menen’s writing has a fair share of satire and provocative incisiveness. Nehru banned the sale of the book in India (it was published in England) in order to assuage the wounded Hindu sentiments. The book “outrages the religious feelings of the Hindus,” Nehru’s government declared. That was long before the Indira Gandhi’s Congress government banned Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses ...

Book Discussion Nathuram Godse killed Mahatma Gandhi in order to save Hindus from emasculation. Gandhi was making Hindu men effeminate, incapable of retaliation. Revenge and violence are required of brave men, according to Godse. Gandhi stripped the Hindu men of their bravery and transmuted them into “sheep and goats,” Godse wrote in an article titled ‘Non-resisting tendency accomplished easily by animals.’ Gandhi had to die in order to salvage the manliness of the Hindu men. This argument that formed the foundation of Godse’s self-defence after Gandhi’s assassination was later modified by Narendra Modi et al as: “ Hindu khatre mein hai ,” Hindus are in danger. So Godse has reincarnated now.   Godse’s hatred of non-Hindus has now become the driving force of Hindutva in India. It arose primarily because of the hurt that Godse’s love for his religious community was hurt. His Hindu sentiments were hurt, in other words. Gandhi, Godse, and the minority question is the theme of the...

Like most government institutions in India, the Archaeological Survey of India [ASI] has also become a gigantic joke. The national surveyors of India’s famed antiquity go around finding all sorts of Hindu relics in Muslim mosques. Like a Shiv Ling [Lord Shiva’s penis] which may in reality be a rotting piece of a Mughal fountain. One of the recent discoveries of Modi’s national surveyors is that Sambhal in UP is the birthplace of Kalki, the tenth incarnation of God Vishnu. I haven’t understood yet whether Kalki was born in Sambhal at some time in India’s great antique history or Kalki is going to be born in Sambhal at some time in the imminent future. What I know is that Kalki is the final incarnation of Vishnu that is going to put an end to the present wicked Kali Yuga led by people like Modi Inc. Kalki will begin the next era, Satya Yuga, the Era of Truth. So he is yet to be born. But a year back, in Feb to be precise, Modi laid the foundation stone of a temple dedicated to Kalk...