Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Dale Carnegie gave us the parable of the two men who looked out from prison bars. “One saw the mud, the other saw stars.” What we see is often our choice. We can choose to see the mud or we can choose to look at the sky. There was once a man who had a dog. He used a strategy for bathing the dog. He would take the dog to the river and throw a ball into the river. Being trained to fetch the ball whenever it was thrown, the dog would jump into the river too and fetch the ball. That swimming would be the dog’s bath. But one day the dog sprang a surprise. When the master threw the ball, the dog, instead of swimming, walked on the water to fetch it. The master was surprised. He threw the ball once again and the dog walked on water again. Maybe, it was an evolutionary step in the dog’s life. The master wanted to show off this to his neighbour. So he asked his neighbour to accompany him to the river. The ball was thrown and the dog fetched it by walking on the river. The neighbour made n...

One of the first roses that bloomed in my little garden The following poem was inspired by it.  Why do you look so penitent like Tagore’s flowe r that asked the master to pluck it without delay lest it droop and drop into dust? Aren’t we all made for the dust? You leave me wondering, however, whether it’s the same master that created the night’s worm which seeks out your bed of crimson joy . Isn’t the worm made for the dust too?

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...

John Keats admired beauty.  Otherwise he could not have written the poem ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’.  The poem narrates the story of a knight in the middle ages who met a beautiful woman in some wilderness.  She, the beauty, allowed him to take her on his horseback to some places as he wished until finally she took him to her cave and lulled him to sleep.  When the knight woke up, the beauty had disappeared.  He went in search of that beauty all over the valley. Keats’ poem ends with the statement that the knight is still searching for the beautiful woman in that valley years and years after she deserted him.  You would think he was a ghost in case you met him there in that valley.  Seekers of beauty became ghosts in Keats’ era (early 19th century) But Keats belonged to an era when people, at least some people, quested after truth which they thought was beauty.  “Beauty is truth and truth beauty.”  Didn’t Keats write that too?...

It's just another cloud in the sky. Yet!!!!!!

This morning [17 April 2011] the Bhatti village in New Delhi woke up to an overcast firmament.  The clouds brought home a majestic guest, this peacock.  It sat on the wall below my quarters giving me food for thought.

Beauty does not necessarily belong to the high realms. It can spread it wings on the ground too. Bloom where you are born.

When man's creativity blends with nature's beauty, Harmony is born.     [For Harmony 1, please see below]