Tomichan Matheikal's blog

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...

Lubna Shibu Book Review Title: Into the Wandering Multiverse Author: Lubna Shibu Publisher: Book Leaf , 2024 Pages: 23 Poetry serves as a profound medium for self-reflection. It offers a canvas where emotions, thoughts, and experiences are distilled into words. Writing poetry is a dive into the depths of one’s consciousness, exploring facets of the poet’s identity and feelings that are often left unspoken. Poets are introverts by nature, I think. Poetry is their way of encountering other people. I was reading Lubna Shibu’s debut anthology of poems while I had a substitution period in a section of grade eleven today at school. One student asked me if she could have a look at the book as I was moving around ensuring discipline while the students were engaged in their regular academic tasks. I gave her the book telling her that the author was a former student in this very classroom just a few years back. I watched the student reading a few poems with some amusement. Then I ask...

  Book Review Title: The Last Courtesan: Writing my mother’s memoir Author: Manish Gaekwad Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2023 Pages: 185 Writing the biography of one’s mother who was a courtesan is not quite a pleasant task. Manish Gaekwad undertakes that arduous task in this book and does a fairly eminent job with it. ‘Courtesan’ may not be quite the exact translation of ‘tawaif,’ which is what Rekha, Gaekwad’s mother, was. A courtesan is essentially a sex worker whose clients are wealthy men. But a tawaif is primarily an artiste, a singer of ghazals as well as a dancer. Sex is part of that job, no doubt. When a woman sings lines like Apna bana le meri jaan / Haye re main tere qurbaan [Make me yours, my love / I am your sacrifice] to a man, sex becomes a natural climax of the show. Rekha is a tawaif. She tells her own story in this book. The author writes the narrative as if his mother is telling him her life’s story. Towards the end of the narrative, Rekha asse...

Book Review Title: Weightless: Unburden Author: Dr Mickey Mehta Publisher: Popular Prakashan, Mumbai, 2023 Pages: 240 This is not a book to be read. It is a set of instructions that are to be put into practice if you wish to have long life with good health. Let me tell you at the outset that practising what the author is asking you to is going to be tough, as tough as becoming a genuine yogi. If you want to enjoy some of the simple delights of life like a weekend drink, then you’d better forget this book and go ahead with a wellness programme of your choice. This book can make you a saint. In fact, it intends to do precisely that. In one of the last pages, introducing the author to the readers, the book says that Dr Mickey Mehta’s vision is “Connecting with 8 billion hearts to make wellness the religion no. 1.” Wellness is indeed a religion in Dr Mehta’s vision. The book starts with a theoretical framework which is founded entirely on Indian philosophy, essentially Yoga a...

Fiction India's new Lady of Justice Raju is shocked out of his deep sleep early in the morning by the doorbell that rings rather imperiously. His mobile phone shows the time: 4.04 am. Who can come visiting at this unearthly hour? Raju looks out through the window and sees a saffron-robed man with a saffron shawl wrapped around his torso standing outside. An alarm bell rings in Raju’s heart. As soon as Raju opens the door, the saffron man hands him a sealed envelope and walks away into the darkness without uttering a single word. The letter is addressed to Mr Rajashekharan, LD Clerk, Shantigram. It is written in extremely formal language. The letter charges Raju of being antinational and orders him to prove his patriotism to concerned authorities at the earliest failing which he will have to face severe consequences under some section of the Naya Nyaya Samhita, New Penal Code. Raju sits with a tremor in his heart on the sofa in his small living room. He doesn’t want to dis...