Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Delhi is a city of flyovers and high-fliers.  People from all over the country are driven to the welter of opportunities that the National Capital Region offers with the magnanimity that the emperors of the walled city displayed to their favourite courtiers and courtesans.  Anyone who has the inclination and the drive will find his or her place in Delhi sooner than later – under the flyover if not above it.  Sprawling landscape around Qutub Minar The loves we share with a city are often not very upfront.  What drives Delhi are not merely the well-maintained roads and flyovers and the exquisite metro service but also the secret gratifications it offers in the sprawling malls with their multiplexes and the greenery that throbs in the woodlands that dot the city’s map with an unusual excess of nature’s bounty.  You can drive a dilapidated Bajaj scooter or a luxurious BMW and be at home in the anonymity of Delhi’s crowded vastness.  You can wear a c...

The political leaders in Delhi are driving the cars of their citizens underground.  Civic Centre on Minto Road is an imposing tower complex that overlooks both Old and New Delhi.  It houses the Municipal Corporations of Delhi, both Old and New.  If you are an ordinary citizen, even if you are driving the costliest car you can afford, you will be asked to park your precious vehicle underground.  All overground parking space is meant for the politicians and their cronies.  Even SUVs bearing an inscription somewhere on or near its number plate claiming allegiance to some politician will get access to the overground parking space.  All the rest will go snaking down to the pit below. In 1895, H G Wells wrote a novel titled The Time Machine in which the author imagined the future of the capitalist world as divided between the Eloi and the Morlocks, people overground and underground.  The Eloi were the capitalists whose vision was grant enough to s...

courtesy The Hindu “Unless we hate what we are not, we cannot love what we are,” said a nationalist demagogue in Michael Dibdin’s novel, Dead Lagoon .  Elaborating on that view, Samuel P. Huntington said in his book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order , “For people seeking identity and reinventing ethnicity, enemies are essential.” I lived in Meghalaya for a decade and a half.  As an enemy in the sense Huntington means.  Dkhar was one of the first Khasi words I learnt.  It is a pejorative term for the ‘outsider’.  I was a dkhar in Shillong just like thousands of others there who hailed from ethnically different backgrounds.  In the latter half of 1980s I witnessed people of Nepali origin being hunted and driven out of Shillong.  I lived in a part of Shillong where people of Nepali origin abounded.  I witnessed people being beaten up brutally.  I saw people being loaded into trucks and driven away. ...

Riding around in Delhi on a rickety scooter is one of my few hobbies.  It gives me a feel of earthiness, a feeling that I am a nobody amidst the costly cars that fly by me.  It makes me feel humble, arrogant as I am.  It helps me to check my dreams.  It roots me in reality, the harsh reality that I like to confront honestly. A traffic policeman stopped me today.  I took off my helmet with a smile that comes rather artificially to me these days. “I’ve broken the law, you can punish me,” I said.  I think the smile had not vanished from my cheeks.   I had jumped a red light.  I had not intended it.  My scooter got stuck on the gravel and the lights turned red before I could cross the range.  This was the first time that I was ever caught in my 12 years of hobbying in Delhi by the omnipresent traffic police of Delhi.  “License?” asked the policeman. I handed him my licence. “... school ...,” he read it ...

This is a silly post though I dare to call it a poem.  Read it at your own risk. “In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo.” T S Eliots’ Prufrock had at least the consolation of women coming and going talking of Michelangelo.   I’m back to regular routine tomorrow.  And women will come and go talking of duties, workshops and seminars.  They call themselves experts.  They will dictate the terms and conditions.  They have the backing of a religious sect. And I will sing along with T S Eliot : Weialala leia Wallala leialala The winter break is over.  The real break is going to begin. Religious break? Or feminine break? I’m looking forward to Madame Sosostris with her Tarot cards.  She will determine the future. The future of her staff.  She has started by terminating the services of the redundant.  Who is not redundant in this world? Is the expert essential? Is the Sw...

I’m getting increasingly convinced that Delhi can only rape.  Ms Sheila Dikshit can shed crocodile tears on the umpteen TV channels to which she condescended to give interviews after the most recent and most publicised gang rape.  I watched her on Times Now, NDTV, and CNN.  She might have given interviews to many other channels too.  She looked like a wax statue that one sees at madametussauds .  That look may be a  gift of current international politics, I grant.   Buy and Sell kind of international politics.  Use and Throw kind of politics. This Buy and Sell+ Use and Throw is what I learnt about as I was on a routine duty today.  I cannot mention the duty and the place as well as the people involved because of the oath of secrecy that even a stupid school teacher has to take these days. The duty brought a Delhi policeman face to face with me.  As we waited wasting our time as demanded by our duties [his as a pol...

Is Delhi starved of entertainment?  The number of people who gathered today, a weekday, at Pragati Maidan to visit the India International Trade Fair (IITF) would make one think so.  The number ran to thousands. A fraction of the visitors at IITF If you were to observe for some time you would easily notice that most visitors never bought anything much from any stall.  The only stalls that did good trade were those dealing in food items. I was also a casual visitor who had no serious intention of buying anything.  I was merely curious and today  being a holiday for me I decided to indulge my curiosity.  The realisation that there are too many people like me in Delhi who visit the IITF merely out of curiosity or just for the heck of it did amuse me.  And people are ready to undergo much inconvenience for the sake of such an insubstantial entertainment. It was entertaining to watch other people, however.  The way they examine certain thing...

I’m quite convinced that I am a Romantic.   The last of the Romantic poets (William Wordsworth) died in 1850.   He was the first of them, in fact.   Yet I call him the last simply because he lived longer than the others. Most of the Romantic poets died young.   P B Shelley lived 30 years.   John Keats died at the age of 26.   Byron managed to make it to 36.   I often wondered why they died so young.   One of the books of Will Durant told me a few years ago that the Romantics died young because they dreamed too big. Durant was not a literary critic.   Literary critics are not supposed to look at the biographies of writers; they are only supposed to analyse the written discourses.   Durant was a philosopher and so he was free to look at the biography (just as he would have been free to look at anything else).   He thought that the Romantics died young because the world they dreamt of could never be materialised. The Romantic...