Tomichan Matheikal's blog

George Steiner God is always present in a good work of art, literature and music.  George Steiner says that in his book, Real Presences .  That God enters our being and asks us to change ourselves.  Good literature, art and music have the power to change us.  They touch our souls, in other words.  Psychology tells us that a lot of our attitudes and behaviour are determined by our subconscious mind.  The subconscious mind is the seat of all the suppressed emotions which can take the shape of the devil at times –  when we lose our cool, for example. It is this subconscious mind that good literature touches, that good music soothes or good art cools.  The suppressed feelings undergo transformation under the influence of good art, literature or music.  That transformative power is God, in Steiner’s words. Aristotle gave it a more secular name: catharsis. The process of writing is also deeply related to the subconscious mind.  Our themes and imagery, our style and diction, t

Fiction It’s not only the gods but the devils too have specific religions, Maria realised when she saw the devil appearing on her husband’s face fifteen years after she had seen it the last time. Fifteen years ago, one nondescript autumn afternoon in Shillong, Philip came back from the school where he worked as a mathematics teacher and declared that he had resigned from his job.  Maria was stunned though she had known deep within her all the time that this was coming.  Reverend Father Joseph Potthukandathil, the Headmaster of Saint Joseph’s School where Philip taught, had been rubbing up Philip in the wrong way for a long time, years in fact, assuming that it was every Catholic priest’s canonical burden to bring the lost sheep back to the fold.  Philip not only refused to accept the priest’s gospel but also cocked a snook at it by guzzling peg after peg of brandy sitting in the Marbaniang Bar that stood just a hundred metres away from the church where the priest who dreamt o

Shoah is the Hebrew word for catastrophe.  Al-Nakba is the Arabic word for the same thing.  The Israelis use Shoah to mean the Holocaust.  The Palestinians use al-Nakba to refer to their exodus caused by the creation of Israel.  Shoah created al-Nakba; one catastrophe led to the other.  The victims of one catastrophe created another catastrophe and its victims.  6 million Jews were the victims of Shoah and their relatives uprooted 700,000 Arabs from their homes in Palestine.  The latter figure has kept on increasing since the Nakba has not ended.  In the words of Anton La Guardia (whose book on the issue was the basis of a former blog of mine), “The wandering Jew found a home, while the homeless Palestinians still wander the Middle East.”  La Guardia wrote that in 2002.  Twelve years down the line, the Jews are so well settled in their homes that they are in a position to eliminate the remaining Palestinians. One catastrophe leads to another.  The only difference is the way