Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Books become my ideal companions in times of political turmoil. Right now, as you’re reading these lines, there are dozens of active armed conflicts going on around the world. Besides, developed countries like America are asking foreign students as well as others to leave. The global economy is experiencing significant instability, characterised by weak growth projections, persistent inflation, high debt levels, and geopolitical conflicts. Even when a country like India advertises itself as becoming the third largest economy, the living conditions of the poor aren’t showing any improvement. Nay, the world isn’t becoming any better than it ever was. It's when such realisations hit you from all sides, you need the consolations of an abiding hobby. Reading is at the top of my list of such hobbies. First of all, books help us understand current events in a broader context . They can reveal patterns in history: how democracies falter, how propaganda spreads, how resistance movements...

In today’s Time of India , Ruskin Bond narrates a revealing anecdote .  A boy who looked after his father’s ration shop requested Mr Bond for a book.  Always happy to encourage youngsters to read, Mr Bond gave the boy a copy of his latest, large-format children’s book.  The next day, Mr Bond bought some jaggery ( gur ) from the boy’s shop and the writer was chagrined to find that the sugar lumps were handed to him in a paper bag made out of the pages of his own book.  “My author’s ego was shattered,” he writes. Ruskin Bond When I decided to gather some of my short stories in a book form I had varied motives.  The primary motive was to dedicate the book to a religious cult because of which I lost my job in Delhi and, far worse, I threw away a large collection of my books in a fit of depression.  The cult took over the school where I taught with the promise “to run it at least for a hundred years” but killed it in a brief span of two years....

I have set a diminutive reading target for the coming year for various reasons.   Just five novels.  If everything goes well (and I’m no optimist), the list may lengthen as the calendar turns.  Well! Umberto Eco Topping the list is Umberto Eco’s new novel, Numero Zero .  The only novel of the author that I have read is his very first one, the one that sold millions of copies in the 1980s,  Name of the Rose .  It was a thriller dexterously peppered with philosophy, theology, history and mystery.  Numero Zero will be released in India in a couple of days.  It traces a conspiracy linking a long line of events in Italian history, from the death of Mussolini to the 1978 kidnapping and assassination of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro by the Red Brigade.  The Piazza Fontana bombing, the sudden death of Pope John Paul I, the Vatican banking scandal, the P2 Masonic lodge, and the shooting of Pope John Paul II, all find their place in ...

The World Book Fair is the latest entertainment in Pragati Maidan, New Delhi.  The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) (always a handmaiden of the Central Government) has sent out a directive to schools in the National Capital Region (NCR) asking them to take students to the Book Fair with a view to encourage reading habits among the young generation. Ten years ago, I took a group of students to the World Book Fair with the noble intention that CBSE is now envisaging.  The students were ingenious enough to find ways of entertaining themselves in places other than the book stalls.  While returning to school I discovered that barring one student nobody had bought a book.  Most of them had not even entered the Book Fair!  (Credit must be given for their candidness in admitting that.) Today’s students are enslaved by the smartphone and the tablet.  While these gadgets can take one to the world of infinite knowledge, they actually end up as d...