Tomichan Matheikal's blog

One of the persons encountered by Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s peripatetic Little Prince is the King of a tiny asteroid.  The King teaches Little Prince that “Accepted authority rests first on reason.  If you ordered your people to go and throw themselves into the sea, they would rise up in revolution.”  The King claims that he has the right to require obedience because his orders are reasonable.   Read the book here From whom will the King demand obedience, however?  Little Prince had noticed that the only inhabitant of the asteroid was the King.  He asks the King, “Over what do you rule?”   “Over everything,” the King answers promptly and makes a majestic gesture which sweeps everything including the stars and the planets.   “And the stars obey you?”  Little Prince is dismayed.   “Certainly they do,” tells the King.  “They do instantly and I do not permit insubordination.”   Little Prince makes a req...

Book Review “The truth is, sir, that men do what their power permits them to do. We are no different from the Pharaohs or the Mongols: the difference is only that when we kill people we feel compelled to pretend that it is for some higher cause.  It is this pretence of virtue, I promise you, that will never be forgiven by history.” Captain Chillingworth of the ship Ibis utters those words in Amitav Ghosh’s novel, Sea of Poppies .  The novel is about power and how different people wield it over others as much as it is about the powerless who are destined to suffer the oppressions.  The novel presents a part of the India in the 1830s.  The British have become very powerful in India and they control the trade too.   As Benjamin Burnham, one of the traders in the novel, says, trade indicates the “march of human freedom.”  Even slave trade is part of that glorious march.  According to Burnham, the white man gave freedom to the African ...