Tomichan Matheikal's blog

I wrote a lot more in Feb 2025 than in the past many months. The Blogchatter has been responsible for that with their #WriteAPageADay challenge. My association with this blogging community is rather short: just a little over four years. I’m concluding the Write-a-page-a-day challenge with this retrospective post. With their various ‘challenges’ such as Write-a-page-a-day and A-to-Z , Blogchatter gave me a lot of impetus to write regularly. Writing sustains me as a person more than anything else because there’s no other place where I can express my views and feelings so freely. Even AI [Artificial Intelligence] has accused me, albeit subtly, of being opinionated. Read, if you wish, what ChatGPT said about my blog the other day on my request: here . I took interest in writing long ago when I was a school student. I wrote in Malayalam in those days because I did my entire schooling in a rustic Malayalam medium government-aided school where English was taught by teachers of chemist...

Book Review Title: Strong Woman: Reba Rakshit Author: Ida Jo Pajunen Publisher: Om Books International, 2024 Pages: 218 Reba Rakshit was a rare kind of entertainer. She could lift an elephant on her chest. She would lie on a mat and a huge plank would be placed on her chest. An elephant would walk on that plank. Reba could bear the weight of that elephant though for a few seconds. Reba was born in what now is Bangladesh. She migrated with her sister to Calcutta (today Kolkata) to live with her uncle who promised them good education. That was a decade and a half before India became independent. A man named Bishnu Charan Gosh discovered Reba’s potential and trained her to become a performer. He was running a college of physical education in Calcutta where Reba became a trainee while she was also pursuing regular school studies. Eventually Ghosh made Reba capable of doing many things like breath control using yoga, weight-lifting, and mind control. Soon enough, Ghosh found h...

  Book Review Title: Stone Yard Devotional Author: Charlotte Wood Publisher: Sceptre 2023 Pages: 297 W hen a novel starts with a middle-aged woman giving up her job in despair and entering into retreat in a cloistered convent where soon arrives the bones of a nun who died long ago elsewhere, it may be presumed to be a suspense thriller or crime fiction. Add plague in the background with mice running all around, and it can become horror. Then comes in another character who was absolutely disliked by the narrator in their schooldays. Charlotte Wood’s latest novel has all of these but it is no thriller or crime fiction or horror story. It is an allegory of sorts on very gentle themes like forgiveness and redemption. The narrator has no name in the novel. The nun who comes with the bones of Sister Jenny who died two decades ago was a school classmate of the narrator. Jenny was probably killed by an American missionary priest in Bangkok where the nun was rendering her serv...

“T here’s a story behind Pole Star which is known as Dhruva Nakshatram in our language,” I said to Davis (not his real name), a 14-year-old who thought a bit too much of himself like most youngsters of today. He was with me next to the driver’s seat in my car and I was his driver in his view. “Are you interested in the story?” Davis’s silence told me clearly that he wasn’t. He wasn’t interested in anything except himself and that was the problem which his mother had brought to me. I told him the story, in spite of his indifference. “Dhruva was the son of King Uttanapada and Queen Suniti. His father favoured his other wife, Suruchi, and her son.” “Lucky guys they were, weren’t they?” Davis interrupted. “Who?” “Those kings of olden days. They could have a lot of wives.” “You want a lot of wives?” “Nah,” he was contemptuous. “I want only girlfriends, not wives.” “You don’t want to take up responsibilities, right?” “Who wants to? Would you take up responsibilities if yo...

Illustration by Copilot Designer Tamil Nadu chief minister M K Stalin has once again pitted the Tamil pride against Hindi pride . He has been championing the Dravidian cause against the Aryan Shahs of Delhi for quite some time now. Just last month, he offered a prize of $1 million to anyone who can decode the Indus Valley script which, Stalin believes as I too do, was proto-Dravidian. As a South Indian, I’m on Stalin’s side. The North shouldn’t impose their culture and language and gods on the Southerners. I’m not speaking on behalf of anyone, please. I’m expressing my personal views. If some people of South India want to be bossed over by someone from the North, that’s their wish and I have no problem with it. I don’t want a native version of colonialism. Like Stalin, I too believe that the Indus Valley Civilisation was Dravidian. Like him again, I would like more research to go into it. The truth may take the entire the wind out of the Hindutva sails. Moreover, the steamroller...

Illustration by ChatGPT I have/had many students whose parents are teachers in schools run or aided by the government. These teachers don’t send their own children to their own schools where education is free. They send their children to private schools like the one where I’ve been working. They pay huge fees to teach their children in schools where teachers are paid half of or less than their salaries. This is one of the many ironies about the Kerala society. An article in yesterday’s The Hindu [ A deeper meaning of declining school enrolment ] takes an insightful look at some of the glaring social issues in Kerala’s educational system. One such issue is the rapidly declining student enrolment in government and aided schools in the state. The private schools in the state, on the other hand, are getting more students. People don’t want to send their children to the schools run by the government systems. The chief reason is that the medium of instruction is Malayalam. The second ...

Preface One of the songs that has haunted me all along is By the Rivers of Babylon by Boney M [1978]. It is inspired by the biblical Psalm 137. The Psalm was written after the Babylonian King, Nebuchadnezzar II, conquered the kingdom of Judah and destroyed their most sacred temple in Jerusalem. The Jews were soon exiled to Babylon. Then some Babylonians asked the Jews to sing songs for them. Psalm 137 is a response to that: “How can we sing the Lord’s song in an alien land?” There is profound sorrow in the psalm. Exile and longing for homeland, oppression by enemies, and loss of identity are dominant themes. Boney M succeeded in carrying all those deep emotions and pain in their verses too. As I was wondering what to write for today’s #WriteAPageADay challenge, Boney M’s version of Psalm 137 wafted into my consciousness from the darkness and silence outside my bedroom long before daybreak. How to make it make sense to a reader of today who may know nothing about the Jewish exile ...

The Guest is a short story of Albert Camus that has remained in my consciousness for years. The protagonist, Daru, is a French schoolteacher who lives in his “schoolhouse” on a remote hillside “almost like a monk.” The setting is during the Algerian War of Independence against France. One day Daru finds himself ordered by a French gendarme to keep an Arab murderer with him for the night before taking him to the police authorities the next morning. Daru is not a shallow nationalist who will do anything that his country demands merely because he was born in that country. He believes in his own individual rights and moral duties more than in national obligations. What do patriotism and nationalism mean if they demand actions from you that go against your personal convictions? You become antinational. You can be labelled anything like ‘a terrorist’ or ‘an urban Naxal.’ You can be arrested and killed by your nation though you have done nothing wrong by your personal morality and convic...

Book Review Title: My Haven Author: Ruchi Chandra Verma Pages: 161 T his little novel is a surfeit of sugar and honey. All the characters that matter are young employees of an IT firm in Bengaluru. One of them, Pihu, 23 years and all too sweet and soft, falls in love with her senior colleague, Aditya. The love is sweetly reciprocated too. The colleagues are all happy, furthermore. No jealousy, no rivalry, nothing that disturbs the utopian equilibrium that the author has created in the novel. What would love be like in a utopia? First of all, there would be no fear or insecurity. No fear of betrayal, jealousy, heartbreak… Emotional security is an essential part of any utopia. There would be complete trust between partners, without the need for games or power struggles. Every relationship would be built on deep understanding, where partners complement each other perfectly. Miscommunication and misunderstanding would be rare or non-existent, as people would have heightened emo...

I joined the #WriteAPageADay challenge of Blogchatter , as I mentioned earlier in another post. I haven’t succeeded in writing a page every day, though. But as long as you manage to write a minimum of 10,000 words in the month of Feb, Blogchatter is contented. I woke up this morning feeling rather vacant in the head, which happens sometimes. Whenever that happens to me but I do want to get on with what I should, I fall back on a book that has inspired me. One such book is Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince . I have wished time and again to meet Little Prince in person as the narrator of his story did. We might have interesting conversations like the ones that exist in the novel. If a sheep eats shrubs, will he also eat flowers? That is one of the questions raised by Little Prince [LP]. “A sheep eats whatever he meets,” the narrator answers. “Even flowers that have thorns?” LP is interested in the rose he has on his tiny planet. When he is told that the sheep will eat f...

Valentines looking out for imperial moral police  Valentine was executed because he encouraged love between man and woman. Ironies are aplenty in his death. First of all, he was a celibate Catholic priest. He lived in the Roman Empire in a time when the Emperor believed in stuff like One Nation One Religion , and Valentine was preaching a different religion. Religion is a national affair as far as emperors are concerned. The emperor decides which god you will pray to. What else is a ruler for, if he can’t decide what you will do? So, Claudius II ordered the death of Rev Valentine because Valentine preached love which Claudius didn’t love. That was way back in the third century CE. There was no social media in those days for young lovers to start a hashtag like #SaveValentineFromBrutalClaudius . Claudius didn’t want young men to marry. He was a champion of Roman masculinity. Men will lose their masculinity if they marry, he believed. Like India’s current Prime Minister. So Cla...

Illustration by Google Gemini I was about to go to bed earlier than usual because I was feeling terribly sleepy. I had slept relatively much less in the past few nights owing to certain urgent evaluation jobs of my school that had to be completed within short period. However, as I stepped into my bedroom, I was reminded of my duties as a patriot and my sleep left me instantly. My Prime Minister sleeps just three hours a day, as he has told us repeatedly. In a 2019 interview that actor Akshay Kumar conducted for ANI, Modi’s answer to the actor’s question about the brevity of his sleep was unabashed: “Even Obama asked me this question.” By the way, Akshay Kumar was a Canadian citizen in those days. But he was a true Indian patriot, according to Modi’s partymen. Probably because he slept less than the average Indians. A few years after Kumar’s interview, Chandrakant Patel of Maharashtra BJP reduced Modi’s sleep to a meagre two hours. “Modiji works 22 hours of the day for the welfare...

Javed Akthar in 2012 Octogenarian Javed Akthar, celebrated screenwriter and lyricist of Bollywood, was asked a question recently by a group of youngsters. Will art and literature have much relevance in the future? Akthar’s answer was an allegory. Millions of fish are caught every day by humans. They are skinned brutally, cut into pieces, cooked in infinitely varied ways, and savoured on dining tables all over the world. We, humans, raise our voice in defence of a lot of animals: cows, dogs, and wild animals too. But no one raises even a feeble cry of protest on behalf of the fish. Do you know why? Because the fish don’t cry. In fact, they do cry; but their cries have no voice. No one hears their cries. The fish are voiceless. The cry of the voiceless is literature. Art is the music of the voiceless. And so they will continue to be relevant as long as there are voiceless creatures on earth. The Jews were the voiceless fish during Hitler’s march of racial triumph – six million of the...