Tomichan Matheikal's blog

The above was the title of an opinion piece published in The Guardian on 20 Oct 2023. After Narendra Modi became the Prime Minister, India’s rank in the press freedom index sank consistently and is now about to drown altogether at 161 out of 180 countries. The case filed against Ms Roy is based on some comments she made in 2010, thirteen years ago. When anyone becomes inconvenient for Modi because they dare to speak the truth on some platform or the other, Modi’s men from such agencies as the Enforcement Directorate or Income Tax or Central Bureau of Investigation will come with the handcuff. Quite many journalists have been arrested after 2014 in India. For telling the truth. Many intellectuals have stopped writing for newspapers and other periodicals just because they don’t want to spend the rest of their life in the prison. No wonder you won’t find even bloggers giving you the truth. Bloggers in India seem to have become influencers . They are doing business instead of writing

“Writing is a dog’s life, but the only life worth living,” said Flaubert. A meticulous writer whose novels became classics though he was, Flaubert died penniless.  Many great writers lived rather miserable lives because writing was not a very remunerative job in those days.  There were many artists too who lived in utter poverty though after their death their paintings were sold for sums which they could never have imagined in life.  Is it because they never worked for money that their works had such profundity?  Does money contaminate everything it touches? There is no money in blogging anyway.  At least, not anything significant.  Flaubert and Dostoevsky could accept the agony of pennilessness because they were in search of something much more meaningful than money.  It is their search for meaning that made their writing profound.  And that search, the search for meaning, is an endless search. Why don’t we find such deep writing today?  The best writers of our times

People have different reasons for writing.  From an expression of one’s thoughts and feelings to looking for appreciation, writing can be motivated by anything.  In most cases, the motives are mixed.  Blogging too has various motives similarly. Whatever we do as a social activity must be done with a considerable sense of responsibility since it affects the society one way or another.  Quite a lot of bloggers engage in harmless activities such as putting up simple poems or photos.  Many focus on travel, food, shopping or some such innocuous theme.  However, when it comes to dealing with political, religious, social and other such issues some caution is required. In 1992, American political scientist Francis Fukuyama predicted that human civilisation would evolve towards a conflict-free utopia founded on liberal democracy and free market capitalism.  Samuel P. Huntington, another political scientist, countered it immediately arguing that the clash of civilisations would con