Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Book Review In one of the first pages of this book, the author cautions us to “read this book as you would a novel.” No one can remember the events of their lives accurately. Roy says that “most of us are a living, breathing soup of memory and imagination … and we may not be the best arbiters of which is which.” What you remember may not be what happened exactly. As we get on with the painful process called life, we keep rewriting our own narratives. The book does read like a novel. Not because Roy has fictionalised her and her mother’s lives. The characters of these two women are extremely complex, that’s why. Then there is Roy’s style which transmutes everything including anger and despair into lyrical poetry. There’s a lot of pain and sadness in this book. The way Roy narrates all that makes it quite a classic in the genre of memoirs. The book is not so much about Roy’s mother Mary as about that mother’s impact on the daughter’s very being. Arundhati was born in the undivided ...

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...

M y knowledge of Hindi is remarkably deficient despite my living in the northern parts of India for three whole decades. The language never appealed to me. Rather, my Hindi teachers at school, without exception, were the coarsest people I ever met in that period of my life and they created my aversion to Hindi. Someone told me later that those who took up Hindi as their academic major in Kerala were people who failed to secure admission to any other course. That is, if you’re good for nothing else, then go for Hindi. And so they end up as disgruntled people. We students became the victims of that discontent. I don’t know if this theory is correct, however. Though I studied Hindi as my third language (there was no other option) at school for six years, I couldn’t speak one good sentence in that language when I turned my back on school happily and with immense relief after the tenth grade. Of course, I could manage some simple sentences like में लड़का हू। [I am a boy.] A few line...

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...

Prime Minister Modi has released a commemorative stamp and coin on the occasion of the centenary of the foundation of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh [RSS]. He glorified the organisation in his speech and spoke about its contribution to India’s freedom struggle. Utter lies. Why does the Prime Minister of a country as big and supposedly glorious stoop so low with blatant mendacity? Modi’s speech made me look once more at the numerous posts I wrote in this space over the years. Let me present a few of them here with brief notes. 1. RSS: A View to the Inside : A book review which looks at the ominous growth of RSS. A quote from the post: The history of India is being rewritten too by the affiliates of the RSS. One of these affiliates, Vidya Bharati, runs about 13,000 schools in the country with 3,200,000 students and 146,000 teachers making it “the largest private school system in India”. Ekal Vidyalayas is another organ of the RSS which runs schools in the remote rural and tribal area...

Book Review   Title: I am What I am: A Memoir Author: Sunitha Krishnan Publisher: Westland, Chennai, 2024 Pages: 284 Sunitha Krishnan is more of a conqueror than a survivor. She was gangraped at the age of 15, and that too because she had started working for the uplift of the girls in a village. She used to interact with the girls, motivate them to go back to school, give them remedial classes, and discuss topics like menstrual hygiene “and other intimate issues”. Some men of the village didn’t like such “revolutionary” moves coming from a little girl. Eight such men violated Sunitha Krishnan one evening as she was returning home from the village. “Any sexual assault is a traumatic event and leaves deep scars on the psyche of the survivor. The shame, the guilt, the feeling of being tainted, the self-loathing that it brings in its wake is universal. I was no exception.” That is how the third chapter, title ‘The Girl Who Did Not Cry’, begins. Sunitha Krishnan didn’t l...

You have your truth and I have mine. There shouldn’t be a problem – until someone lies. Unfortunately, lying has been elevated as a virtue in present India. There are all sorts of truths, some of which are irrefutable. As a friend said the other day with a little frustration, the eternal truth is this: No matter how many times you check, the Wi-Fi will always run fastest when you don’t actually need it – and collapse the moment you’re about to hit Submit . Philosophers call it irony. Engineers call it Murphy’s Law. The rest of us just call it life. Life is impossible without countless such truths. Consider the following; ·       Change is inevitable. ·       Mortality is universal. ·       Actions have consequences. [Even if you may seem invincible, your karma will catch up, just wait.] ·       Water boils at 100 o C under normal atmospheric pressure. ·    ...

Illustration by Copilot Designer Thirteen-year-old Briony makes a terrible mistake. She falsely accuses Robbie of raping Lola. Robbie is arrested. Cecilia is heartbroken. Briony herself regrets her act, but too late. All the painful harms have already been done. Atonement can be meaningless sometimes. Briony, Robbie, Cecilia, all belong to Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement (2001). Why did Briony make a false charge against Robbie? First of all, there was a serious misunderstanding. Briony presumed that Robbie’s romantic interest in Cecilia, Briony’s elder sister, was lust with a mask. Secondly, Briony was probably jealous of the relationship between her sister and Robbie. As a little child, Briony had jumped into a river merely to be saved by Robbie. When asked why she did such a dangerous thing, her answer was, “Because I love you.” Robbie is accused of raping Lola, Briony’s cousin. It was Paul Marshall who actually violated Lola, not once but twice. Briony did not see the man who r...

  Dostoevsky Dostoevsky was a compulsive gambler. He also consumed alcohol rather liberally. But he remains one of my favourite novelists of all time. Very few writers have produced novels that surpass the greatness of The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment . This raises a fundamental question: Should we keep a writer’s personal life totally aside while assessing the literary merit of their works? Going a little further with Dostoevsky, his personal vices gave him firsthand experience of despair, guilt, and redemption, which shaped the deep psychological and moral explorations in his novels. Raskolnikov and Ivan Karamazov were all parts of Dostoevksy’s complex personality. In other words, if Dostoevsky was an ideal human being, he wasn’t likely to have produced such great novels. It may also be recalled that most of his greatest works were written under extreme pressure from creditors who kept knocking at his door. If he were not the compulsive gambler that he was, t...

Book Review   Title: A Man Called Ove Author: Fredrik Backman Translation from Swedish: Henning Koch Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd, London, 2015 Pages: 295   Ove is a grumpy old man. Right in the initial pages of the novel, we are informed that “People said he was bitter. Maybe they were right. He’d never reflected much on it. People also called him ‘anti-social’. Ove assumed this meant he wasn’t overly keen on people. And in this instance he could totally agree with them. More often than not people were out of their minds.” The novel is Ove’s story It is Ove’s grumpiness that makes him a fascinating character for the reader. Grumpiness notwithstanding, Ove has a lot of goodness within. His world is governed by rules, order and routines. He is superhumanly hardworking and honest. He won’t speak about other people even if such silence means the loss of his job and even personal honour. When his colleague Tom steals money and puts the blame squarely...

Illustration by Copilot Designer I disabled Facebook on my phone yesterday. There’s too much vulgarity, subhuman crudity, on it. And the first thing I read this morning was a Malayalam weekly – Samakalika Malayalam from the Indian Express group – whose editorial lamented the treatment meted out on social media to Dr M Leelavathi, renowned Malayalam writer. Leelavathi refused to celebrate her 98 th birthday because she said she was distressed by the pictures of innocent children dying of human-made hunger in Gaza. She was trolled by the Hindu right wing in Kerala for saying that. The editorial mentioned above requests the “Hindutva handles” to leave alone Leelavathi. If Kerala’s beloved poet and educationist was moved to tears by the sight of little children behaving like insane creatures as soon as they espy some food, it only reveals the deep humanity that sustained her poetry as well as her world vision. The editorial went on to mention that 20,000 children were killed by Is...

Front pages of Newspapers in Delhi on Modi's birthday Yesterday the newspapers in Delhi (and many other places too) carried full page photo of Narendra Modi to celebrate his 75 th birthday. It was sycophancy at its zenith in the history of India’s print media. At no other point in the country’s history had the newspaper industry stooped so low. The first Prime Minister of the country was a man who encouraged the media to be critical of him. Nehru appreciated cartoons that caricatured him mercilessly. Criticism, particularly in the press, helped Nehru keep his ego under check. Shankar’s Weekly was the best cartoon magazine of those times. Launched in 1948 by K Shankar Pillai, the weekly featured political cartoons, satire and humorous articles. It criticised politicians mercilessly by caricaturing or satirising them. Nehru was a prime target. And the PM wasn’t upset. On the contrary, he appreciated Shankar Pillai’s efforts to make the nation, particularly its political leade...

As Mr Narendra Modi completes 75, let me extend heartiest greetings from a faithful critic of his. May he live long and work for a better India, at least better than what he has made of it in the last decade. It is a different matter that he expelled many of his partymen at the age of 75 from active life. The leader of the RSS, the organisation that shaped Modi’s ideology, reminded Modi a few weeks back that “When you turn 75, it means you should stop now and make way for others.” Of course, we know that Modi won’t listen to anyone simply because he doesn’t consider anyone worthy of giving him counsel. I can write a voluminous book on how Modi could (and should) change himself on his 75 th birthday so that the nation will change itself revolutionarily. As a fatalist, however, I desist from doing anything of the sort and console myself that Modi ji is part of India’s current destiny. When the Saturn changes its position in the cosmic setup, India’s destiny will alter too. Wait for tha...