Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Susmesh Chandroth in his kitchen “Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought,” Poet Shelley told us long ago. I was reading an interview with a prominent Malayalam writer, Susmesh Chandroth, this morning when Shelley returned to my memory. Chandroth says he left Kerala because the state had too much of affluence which is not conducive for the production of good art and literature. He chose to live in Kolkata where there is the agony of existence and hence also its ecstasies. He’s right about Kerala’s affluence. The state has eradicated poverty except in some small tribal pockets. Today almost every family in Kerala has at least one person working abroad and sending dollars home making the state’s economy far better than that of most of its counterparts. You will find palatial houses in Kerala with hardly anyone living in them. People who live in some distant foreign land get mansions constructed back home though they may never intend to come and live here. There are ...

Book Review Title: Amrita & Victor Author: Ashwini Bhatnagar Publisher: Fingerprint, New Delhi, 2023 Pages: 216 Artists see reality differently. The colours and contours of objects catch their attention first. Most of us who are not so artistic perceive objects conceptually. Non-artists turn images into concepts, in other words. Colours and contours have much to do with emotions and passions. No wonder Irving Stone’s biographical novel on Vincent Van Gogh is titled Lust for Life . Art is a kind of lust, or result of lust. Amrita & Victor is the biography of a very gifted painter who died at the young age of 28 years, having achieved considerable fame. Her full name was Amrita Dalma Antonia Sher-Gil. Her mother Marie Antoinette was from Hungary and she got the child baptised as a Christian. The father, Umrao Sher-Gil, was a Sikh from India who didn’t care much for religion. Amrita got professional training in art right from her childhood. Everyone who came into co...

Quintin Matsys, from Wikipedia There was a young man in Antwerp. And there was a young girl too. We don’t need anything more to begin a romantic story. And that’s just what happened. The man and the girl fell in love with each other. Passionately. The normal course would have been marriage and family life. But that didn’t happen. Because the man was a blacksmith and farrier by profession and the girl was the daughter of a painter. ‘I don’t want my daughter to marry a blacksmith,’ the master painter asserted. It was in the 15 th century. Feminism was not even a thought-experiment. And the boys didn’t have all the fun. Love has a unique power – the century doesn’t matter. Quintin Matsys was determined to win over the master painter and then his daughter. He sneaked into the master’s studio one day and painted a small fly on the master’s current frame. When the master returned to the studio, he tried to swat the fly only to discover that it was a painted one. The master was quick t...

George Steiner God is always present in a good work of art, literature and music.  George Steiner says that in his book, Real Presences .  That God enters our being and asks us to change ourselves.  Good literature, art and music have the power to change us.  They touch our souls, in other words.  Psychology tells us that a lot of our attitudes and behaviour are determined by our subconscious mind.  The subconscious mind is the seat of all the suppressed emotions which can take the shape of the devil at times –  when we lose our cool, for example. It is this subconscious mind that good literature touches, that good music soothes or good art cools.  The suppressed feelings undergo transformation under the influence of good art, literature or music.  That transformative power is God, in Steiner’s words. Aristotle gave it a more secular name: catharsis. The process of writing is also deeply related to the subconscious mind. ...

Madhuri had reasons to be chagrined: her idol had deserted her.  She had deserted her family, defied her beloved father, to live with her idol, the famous novelist Amitabh Sinha.  Her devotion to the idol was such that she took all the necessary precaution to avoid getting pregnant.  Children would divert her devotion from her idol.  Five years of selfless worship.  Yet he deserted her.  What’s unbearable was that he took as his beloved the woman whom Madhuri hated the most.  Sheila the witch with her two kids one of whom was a moron.  Madhuri had first fallen in love with Amitabh’s novels.  The love grew into admiration and it spread like a contagious disease from the creation to the creator.  “Don’t trust writers and such people,” Madhuri was warned by her father.  “They can’t love anyone except themselves and their works.” Madhuri was sure that Amitabh would love her.  How can a god ignore his most ardent...

Book Review “I’ve done some things I shouldn’t have, I want to put them right....” “Hard to put things right.  You don’t often get that chance.  Sometimes all you can do is not get caught.” [Page 550, The Goldfinch , Donna Tartt, London: Little, Brown, 2013] Dona Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Goldfinch , is a tour de force that explores the theme of growing up in a world which is an inextricable mix of good and evil, beauty and filth.  Theo Decker, the protagonist and first person narrator of the novel, is thirteen years old when he loses his mother to a bomb explosion in the Metropolitan museum in New York.  Their father, an alcoholic gambler, had already abandoned them.  Theo’s world turns upside down after his mother’s death.  All the love and security he needed as a young adolescent is stolen by the tragedy.  He is taken care of by the Barbours until his father comes to claim him learning that much money had been put as...

Paul Cezanne “How do I judge art?”  Paul asked the man who had introduced himself as Ambroise Vollard.  “When I complete a painting, I take it and place it near a God-made thing, a tree or a flower; if it clashes, it’s not art.” Paul Cezanne had failed every time he submitted his works to the Paris Salon for exhibition.  The true artist cannot change his art in order to please the gallery.  Art is not a commercial product.  You paint according to your artistic taste and sensibility.  If people can appreciate them, it’s good.  Otherwise, it is still good.  Follow your soul’s diktats.  Paul did just that.  From 1864, when he was 25 years old, he submitted his paintings to the Salon for nearly two decades.  Rejections did not cloud his soul.  After all, his father, Louis-Auguste Cézanne was a successful banker and had left him enough money to live on.  “I was lucky,” Paul explained to Vallard, “selling my pa...

Short Fiction   Sculptor was frustrated.   He had a theory that every rock contained within it the statue which the artist has only to discover.  Sculpture is the art of dis-covering.  But the rock on which he was working refused to reveal the statue it contained.  Sculptor looked at his semi-finished statue from left and right, front and back, from all angles possible.  No, this isn’t what I had seen in the rock.  Yes, a sudden realisation dawned on him.  I’ve been making a mistake.  I had seen a particular statue in the rock while the rock contained a quite different one.   He took his hammer and chisel again.  In the place of Sita which he had been trying to carve, now emerged Ravana.  With one face containing all the ten faces.