Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Modi was in Kerala the other day. His speech was distressingly interspersed with the ominous phrase “Modi’s guarantee”. For example, he would say: “Every Indian will have a toilet, this is Modi’s guarantee” or “India will be a $5 trillion economy, this is Modi’s guarantee.” This morning, the latest edition of a Malayalam weekly, Sathyadeepam , reached me along with other subscribed publications. I was impressed by its editorial. Please allow me translate it and bring it to you because I think it deserves to be read by many more people than the limited subscribers of Sathyadeepam . Those who wish to read it in the original Malayalam can do so here . The translation is not literal, I have taken the liberty to edit it for the sake of better clarity to a non-Keralite reader. I hope the Sathyadeepam editor will forgive my transgressions. M odi is not the guarantee, the country's constitution is . Since the prime minister has the constitutional obligation to ensure development and se

A country is really free only when its citizens are free.  Freedom is not merely deliverance from foreign occupation.  Freedom is deliverance from poverty, injustice and other social evils as well as personal evils such as greed and jealousy which give birth to corruption of all sorts.  India is yet to be free.    There are millions of people in India who go to bed hungry even after seven decades of independence.  There are millions who don’t have access to basic healthcare.  Our public distributions systems and primary healthcare systems are abject failures.  The country is still enslaved by poverty.  Can we call it a free country? A man who has to carry the dead body of his wife on his shoulders for kilometres because he cannot afford to hire a vehicle should shake us out of our smugness.  He is a poignant symbol of the callousness that marks a governance which gives more importance to cows, idols and myths. India needs deliverance from its holy cows and myths.  It i

An Uttarakhand court has fined Baba Ramdev’s Patanjali Rs 11 lakh for fraudulence.  In 2012 the District Food Safety Department had found that many food items such as mustard oil, salt, pineapple jam and honey sold by Patanjali failed quality tests.  In fact, many of these items are not even produced by Ramdev’s Ayurvedic units; they are produced by ordinary commercial enterprises and then given Patanjali labels.  Such is the Baba’s fraudulence.  There are scores of legal cases filed against the godman and his so-called Ayurvedic industry.   The Baba is guilty of manifold crimes ranging from misleading people to evading taxes.  In 2012, when the godman was asked to pay up Rs 120 crore as penalty for various offences, Digvijay Singh remarked, ““I have seen many frauds in my life but Baba Ramdev takes the cake. He may be occupying more space in media now but I do not visualise Ramdev making an impact on our society for long.  Such people do not last long in public life.” Mr S

Thomas Jefferson who drafted the famous American Declaration of Independence which contains the oft-quoted phrase that “all men are created equal” owned about 200 slaves when he wrote that and never set them free even upon his death .  It doesn’t mean Jefferson was a fraud or even a hypocrite.  Rather it points to certain bizarre truths about social systems and the beliefs which create them.  The Americans during Jefferson’s time did not even consider Negroes as human beings.  Negroes were subhuman, according to the beliefs that upheld the American social system of the time. All social systems are built upon certain beliefs most of which may not stand up to rational analysis.  The ancient Indian caste system or many other social practices such as Sati were not based on any objective truths.  Social systems are created by certain individuals in order to protect their interests by subordinating the interests of others.  It was not mere selfishness either.  More than selfishne

Kerala does not have the tradition of re-electing a government.  So yesterday’s poll results would not have surprised anybody.  Moreover, the UDF government was steeped in corruption charges.  Kerala Results in a nutshell Yet the Pala constituency re-elected K. M. Mani who faced serious allegations related to the bar scam.  The people of Pala are neither ignorant politically nor blind in their allegiance to Mr Mani.  Mani has done much for the people of his constituency.  He has intimate relationships with the Catholic church which is a strong force in Pala.  People benefit one way or another if Mani is in power.  That is the secret of Mani’s success.  It has nothing to do with any ideology. P. C. George who rebelled furiously against Mani’s corruption and became an enemy of both the UDF and the LDF because of his undiplomatic forthrightness and bravado won as an independent candidate from Poonjar, Mani’s neighbouring constituency.  George’s victory indicates that wha

Courtesy: Lawlex Just ten days from the elections in Kerala, I’m left wondering who to vote for.  The UDF government that ruled the state for the last five years has almost ruined the state.  Scams and scandals haunted the government throughout its reign.  It appears that every Congressman in the state is either a money-guzzler or an accomplice of some swindler.  When the Opposition leader, nonagenarian V S Achuthanandan, alleged that there were many charges against the Chief Minister, Mr Oommen Chandy filed a defamation case for a damage of Rs 1 lakh.  Mr Chandy’s reputation cannot be very precious when the wily man had refused to file any defamation charge against Saritha Nair who went on hurling all sorts of allegations against him.  There seem to be very few Congressmen left in Kerala whose otherwise immaculately white, perfectly starched, khadi shirts are not tainted with variegated stains of corruption.  There are a few who are not corrupt in the traditional sense.  But t

Sarita Nair with Oommen Chandy A long-term entertainment in Kerala Sarita Nair is a symbol of the cancerous rot that has eaten into the Indian polity.  She has been levelling allegation after allegation against various political leaders, particularly of the ruling United Democratic Front, in Kerala.  The media would lap up the allegation, hold prime time discussions, call Sarita “a bomb,” and – nothing more.  Sarita became an entertainment for the watchers of Malayalam news channels.  Why does nothing happen to all the people against whom she levels serious charges? Yesterday she went to the extent of accusing none other than the septuagenarian Chief Minister, Mr Oommen Chandy , whom she had not so long ago described as “a father figure,” of having sexually exploited her.  According to various allegations levelled as the opportunity suited her, she has slept with Mr Chandy’s son also as well as almost every important Congressman in Kerala and the Congressman’s cronies.    

“No,” I said vehemently into the mobile phone.  But he wouldn’t listen.  The zeal for his “Lord and God” had overwhelmed him. “Why is it that you don’t want me to come to Kerala?” he asked.  “You people claim that it is God’s own land and now you don’t want me, the God’s apostle, to come to God’s own land?” He was Thomas, one of the disciples of Jesus.  He wanted to bring the light of Jesus to Kerala.  I explained to him with my whole heart and soul that the Malayalis never accepted any truth from outside the state, though they depended on other states for everything else including vegetables.  They think that they possess all the truth and nothing but the truth. “How can you make such a ridiculous claim?” exclaimed Thomas who was convinced that his Master was the only Truth and Light.  Thomas claimed that he had even verified Jesus’ truth scientifically.  “Empirically,” he amended himself when I asked, “Scientifically?”  He had touched the nail marks on Jesus’ palms an

Some three or four years ago, a former student of mine who was then a budding leader of a national political party, told me that he could “sell” me a party ticket for Rs 5 crore.  The sum astounded me.  “It’s nothing, sir,” he reassured me, “I’ll teach you how to get that amount back in a month’s time once you win the election.” When I heard Aam Aadmi Party’s lament that the BJP was trying to buy its MLA for Rs 4 crore, it didn’t surprise me.  If people are ready to buy party tickets before the election for crores of rupees, the neta’s price after winning the election should be a double digit crore.  Four crore is rather cheap, I think, for a sitting MLA.  Is that why AAP decided to cry foul? Delhi BJP vice president, Sher Singh Dagar, reacted very formulaically.  “If it is proved I’ll not only resign from the party, but from politics itself,” he said.  Every neta worth his sodium chloride knows how to plug any hole with darkness.  If you are not a master of darkness, you c

I’m not surprised that the Harvard University invited Lalu Prasad Yadav to deliver a lecture on management.  If he could create horns for pigs, Harvard could colonise paradise.  The cartoon is taken from the latest issue of Tehelka .  The magazine says that Lalu’s Rs950-crore scam that sent him to jail (which he will make a paradise inviting the Harvard professors to visit him) had some “fantastic” statistics.  For example: “... Rs 15 lakh worth of mustard oil for polishing horns of buffaloes and pigs (yes, pigs) and several crores for transporting cattle on oil tankers, police vans, autorickshaws, and scooters (yes, scooters)."[emphasis added] The title of the article is: “TAKING THE STATE FOR A RIDE: How a CM & Co gamed the system.” I think the cartoonist should have added horns to the pigs on the scooter. Lalu Yadav should be given management lessons in oiling  the horns of pigs in the jail.    How long will ordinary people continue to let

Book Review Title     : Swaraj Author : Arvind Kejriwal Publisher         : Harper Collins India & India Today Group, 2012 Pages               : 151                            Rs. 150 Arvind Kejriwal is driven by his passion to sweep clean the Indian political system.  His book, Swaraj , is redolent of that passion from the first page to the last.  The book, claims Anna Hazare on the front cover, “is a manifesto for our times and for the anti-corruption movement...” In fact, the book may be seen as a manifesto of Kejriwal’s Aam Admi Party whose election symbol is the broom. The book reads like a pamphlet written by a puritan mind seized with the zeal for political reformation.  The tone is very demagogic and self-righteous.  Examples are taken randomly from here and there to substantiate arguments without giving certain necessary details like the names of people or firms involved.  There is only one central argument in the book: power should be given to

The Hindu editorial [May 17, 2013] invokes Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase, ‘the banality of evil,’ in order to underscore the corruption that has infiltrated Indian cricket, particularly the IPL.  In simple words what Arendt meant by the phrase was that monstrous evils are not usually perpetrated by fanatics or psychopaths but by ordinary people who fail to think deeply or seriously enough. Failure to think seriously enough is a very common trait of our contemporary civilisation.  Ours is a civilisation which has nearly killed philosophy and serious literature.  It is a civilisation built up on the single premise of materialism and propagated assiduously by the United States of America using institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank.  It is a civilisation which encourages consumerism and superficial pleasures of life.  It is a civilisation whose singular password is commerce. Trade greases the wheels of our civilisation.  And everything is a commodity which can

The novel that I started reading yesterday and keeps my attention riveted is Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Dream of the Celt (2012).   Llosa won the Nobel Prize for Literature two years ago.   The reason why I bought this novel of his is not that, however.   The novel is about Roger Casement, a controversial hero of Irish nationalism.   My reason for buying the novel was not that either.   I ordered for the book when I read in a review that the novel was about the barbarism perpetrated by the European colonists in the Congo.   Llosa’s protagonist was an Irishman who went to the Congo with the noble desire to “civilize” the people there.   A few pages into the novel, I am quite delighted to come across Joseph Conrad as a character.   Conrad was a sailor and he met Roger in the Congo.   In Llosa’s novel, Conrad tells Roger that the latter “should have appeared as co-author” of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness . In Heart of Darkness , a character named Marlow tells the story of Kurtz to

Baba Ramdev, Anna Hazare, thousands of their supporters (i.e., thousands of Indians) are demanding a corruption-free India, corruption-free politics in the country. How many of these thousands of Indians trying to save the country from corruption have paid bribes to get their job done?  Is paying bribe an act of helplessness?  Or is it an act of convenience? The above cartoon is from The Hindu [11 June 2011]. The Sunday Magazine of the same issue of The Hindu carries an article by Harsh Mander on the cover. Mander tells the story of a young DM who tried to rid his district of corruption.  He faced staunch opposition from the politicians of all levels including the local sarpanches.  Finally when he was about to win his war, he was transferred and all his efforts were scuttled. You can read Mander's article here: http://www.thehindu.com/arts/magazine/article2090149.ece Corruption is deeply rooted in the Indian psyche, in the collective unconscious of the country. That's why