Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Venkatesh's mother ( The Hindu) Venkatesh was a nine-year-old boy in a country that claims to be the third largest economy in the world. He became a bonded labourer because his mother could not repay a loan of Rs15,000 that she had taken from her employer, Muthu. He became what Muthu called “collateral.” The boy was employed in a distant farm to look after ducks and his mother was told that the loan amount now became Rs42,000 with interest and compound interest. The mother managed to collect that sum of money and reach Muthu’s farm that is 270 km away from her village. But Venkatesh wasn’t there. “He ran away,” Muthu said. The man also accused the boy of having stolen his phone and some cash. He also abused the woman and her caste. Soon there was a police investigation and Venkatesh’s decomposing body was found buried near the Palar River. The autopsy stated the cause of death as “blunt force injury to the head by heavy weapon” (sic). Today’s The Hindu has devoted one whol...

Delivering a lecture in Kerala the other day, N Ram, former editor of The Hindu , described Narendra Modi’s style of governance as “incremental authoritarianism.”   Democracy is slowly but steadily being eroded in India by Modi. How does he do it? ·       Consolidation of executive power ·       Undermining of judicial independence or press freedom ·       Weakening of opposition parties ·       Use of state apparatus to target dissent ·       Erosion of civil liberties ·       Nationalist rhetoric used to delegitimize critics ·       Misinformation and disinformation spread via all available forms of media and propaganda machinery ·       Disdain for the Constitution of the country The Parliament is a mere scarecrow today. A scarecrow in a Waste Land . Mr Modi doe...

My village river in spate The teak that stood on a side of my house came down yesterday. It had to be felled before the cyclonic winds brought it down on our house. A tree that had stood there for some three decades lay flat on the ground in less than an hour. The lithe man who brought it down branch by branch is 74 years old, I am told. He did look old, though 74 might be hyperbole. He threw a rope over a tall branch of the teak with the help of a weight attached to the end of the rope and once the rope was tied securely on to the branch, the man climbed it up like a monkey. He was right on top in the wink of an eye. The teak being felled Winds are bringing a lot of trees down in Kerala these days. Every day we hear reports about the ravages of winds. Electric power fails because trees fall on the lines. The monsoon has just started. Monsoon in Kerala means incessant rains and constant power failures. When I was a young boy, Monsoon in Kerala had similar incessant rains. But we ...

From Times of India Donald Trump is a big bullshitter but Narendra Modi is far more sinister. This is what Harry Frankfurt, author of On Bullshit , would have said, and what Meera Nanda, author of many books, actually said. I haven’t read the books by either of them. I’ve read quite a few articles written by Meera Nanda in various Indian periodicals. The latest is an interview with her by a Malayalam weekly ( Mathrubhumi ). In that interview, Nanda differentiates between ‘big lies’ and ‘deep lies’ and goes on to illustrate the two concepts with the examples of Trump and Modi. Trump is a ‘big liar’ while Modi is a ‘deep liar.’ Both are similar in their respective ‘visions’ of America-First and Hinduism-First, Prof Nanda says. Both endanger the secular fabric of their societies. However, Trump is yet to declare Christian nationalism as the official American stance while Modi has declared Hindu nationalism as the state ideology. How do the two go about materialising their vision? Tr...

“Most of us pick up morality in the course of growing up, in an unorganized manner through bits and pieces of our scattered and fragmented experiences.” I’m quoting Avichal again. The book was mentioned in my last post which was inspired by it. This book, whose subtitle is Moral Philosophy, Organisational Theory and Hostage Rescue , keeps provoking me every now and then though I haven’t developed a liking for it in general because of its tendency to scientify matters (see a page below, for example).  Morality is a personal affair. Where do we get it from? That’s the direction in which my thoughts shot off as I read Avichal’s paragraphs on the subject. I was born and brought up in an extremely orthodox Catholic family in the rural backyards of Kerala. The children woke up when the rouser bell tolled at 5.30 am from the parish church not far from home. We were too many children, ten of us to be precise, because our parents were strict adherents of their Church’s injunctions o...

From  www.13draw.com In 1978, more than 900 people consumed drinks laced with cyanide and committed suicide. They were obeying their leader, a man named Jim Jones. Jim Jones was the founder of a cult called The Peoples Temple. There was nothing original about the cult. Its credo was a mixture of Christian rhetoric and socialist ideology. Jones was a charismatic orator. If you have charisma and eloquence, you can get people to do anything, provided you know how to wield religion effectively. You can even get people to kill themselves or others. Thomas Theorem in sociology states: If humans define situations as real, they are real in their consequences . In other words, much reality is a creation of humans. Reality is a social construct, shaped and developed by a culture. Culture is a particular way of thinking, feeling, and doing. It resides in a people’s collective thoughts and emotions, shared beliefs and behaviours, many of which are sheer myths. For example, milk and milk...

Rev Joseph Elavanal SDB in cassock Cordialness is more natural to humans than war. That is my experience in general. It may be because my associations with people were severely limited by my shyness and social anxiety which is not exactly introversion. An unexpected encounter with Reverend Joseph Elavanal SDB [ Salesian of Don Bosco ] evoked a flood of thoughts and memories in me. I had been invited by Orchid Spell Bee to be a judge of a state-level spelling competition for school students. The competition went on the whole day from 9 am to 6 pm. Hundreds of students from class one to eight participated from various parts of Kerala. Though there were 5 judges taking turns, the duty was quite hectic, and I had reasons to be relieved when the event was drawing to a close with the appearance of a Catholic priest in immaculate cassock at the far end of the auditorium. I didn’t recognise Father Joseph Elavanal who was introduced to me by the organisers as the Rector (without mentioni...

Dr Shashi Tharoor is not a politician really. He has certain noble objectives like making his country better if possible: economically, culturally, and intellectually too – for all rather than a select few. That is why he keeps making statements like “The nation is more important than politics.” His party, the Congress, cannot understand such notions because its leaders are all politicians. And politics is all about power and little else. Politics is pursuit of power. It has nothing to do with serving the people. If you want to serve people, become a useful professional like a doctor, a teacher, an engineer, and so on, and contribute to the welfare of the people. Politics is all about dominating, controlling, and influencing others and wilfully working to have your way against the opposition of others. That is why politicians spend huge sums of money on propaganda and self-publicity. They resort to all sorts of strategies to ensure that their domination is as total as it possi...

Religion Never did I feel an urge to read the Quran until three things happened one after the other a few weeks back. One: a Muslim friend, whom I came to know years ago through blogging, said he had never read the Quran because he found it “boring.” I was amused, but not surprised because this friend’s wife was a Hindu and so his religious sentiments were, in all reasonable probability, not quite strident, let alone militant. The second thing that happened within hours of the above Muslim friend’s confession was another friend’s – a Christian, this time – claim that he had read the whole of Quran and that he found hatred spilling out of “every page” of it. “Every page?” I was incredulous. “Well, almost,” he edited his statement rather reluctantly. And a day after the above two came the third and the most amusing incident. A female Muslim blogger-acquaintance sent me a friend request on Facebook which I accepted without my usual hesitation merely because I knew her as a fellow-bl...

Wolf Larsen as imagined by Gemini AI Book Chat “Good-bye, Lucifer, proud spirit.” Maud Brewster pays her tribute to the dying Wolf Larsen, protagonist of Jack London’s novel The Sea Wolf (1904). Wolf is not Larsen’s real name. He got that name because of his inhuman personality traits. Maud Brewster calls him Lucifer and he might as well be that proud but fallen angel. Larsen lives totally outside normal human conventions. He is the captain of a ship named Ghost . It is a seal-hunting schooner. Larsen is an absolute dictator on the ship and the entire novel takes place on that ship except a couple of chapters towards the end. (And those few chapters are rather boring.) Might is right for Larsen. He is a staunch follower of the Darwinian principle of survival of the fittest. Fitness, for Larsen, is physical and it has nothing to do with the intellect and least of all with morality. Morality is a mere human construct, he argues, made for the safety of the weak. “Might is right, ...

The Sabarmati Ashram Now that India has proved its might to the world by flexing her muscles on its pet enemy’s national borders as well as TV screens, she can get on with regular affairs like rewriting history. One of the places where history is going to be reshaped is Mahatma Gandhi’s own beloved Sabarmati Ashram. A sum of INR1200 crore (12,000 million) has been allocated for the purpose. The Mahatma Gandhi’s great-grandson, Tushar Gandhi, has filed a petition against the project in the court saying that “the proposed project will alter the topography of the century-old ashram … and corrupt its ethos.” Some 200 buildings in the place will be destroyed or rebuilt. In other words, Sabarmati won’t have anything to do with Mahatma Gandhi’s spirit after the project is completed. In other words, the project aims at evacuating Gandhi from his own home. Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon is preserved as a museum and tourist destination. All efforts have been made to main...