Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Fiction Image from Pinterest “I met Ashwatthama.” When Doctor Prabhakar told me this, I thought he was talking figuratively. Metaphors were his weaknesses. “The real virus is in the human heart, Jai,” he had told me when the pandemic named Covid-19 started holding the country hostage. I thought his Ashwatthama was similarly figurative. Ashwatthama was Dronacharya’s son in the Mahabharata. He was blessed with immortality by Shiva. But the blessing became a horrible curse when Krishna punished him for killing the Pandava kids deceptively after Kurukshetra was brought to peace, however fragile that peace was, using all the frauds that a god could possibly use. Krishna of the Kurukshetra was no less a fraud than a run-of-the-mill politician in my imagination. He could get an innocent elephant named Ashwatthama killed and then convert that killing into a blatant lie to demoralise Drona. He could ask Bhima to hit Duryodhana below the belt without feeling any moral qualms in what...

Book Review Title: The Difficulty of Being Good Author: Gurcharan Das Publisher: Penguin India, 2012 The Mahabharata is an epic that can be interpreted in numerous ways.  As Gurcharan Das says, “It is a cosmic allegory of the eternal struggle between good and evil on one plane.  At another level, it is about an all-too-human fight between the cousins of a royal family, which leads to a war and ends tragically in the death of almost everyone.  At a third level – and this is primarily the subject of my book – it is about the crisis of conscience of some of its characters.” Das spent six years studying the epic, having taken an “academic holiday” from his successful career as a writer.  Before turning to fulltime writing, Das worked with multinational companies.  The prevalence of evil in the world of human beings set Das on a kind of spiritual quest.  The Difficulty of Being Good was the outcome.  The book is an intellec...

Fiction His heart seethed with envy as he returned to his palace from the Pandava capital.  In spite of all that he had done to eliminate his cousins, they had become more successful and powerful than him.  “I can feel your heartbeat,” Uncle Shakuni told Duryodhana as they were returning from Indraprastha having attended the rajasuya ceremony meant to proclaim the sovereignty of Yudhishtira.  The envy that wiggled its way like a worm into Duryodhana’s heart during the ceremony had made him so blind that he could not even distinguish between land and water.  He fell into the lake beside the Pandava Palace.  His cousins laughed at him as he was struggling to swim with all the royal robes on.   Shakuni had helped his insulted and irate nephew come out of the lake without stripping himself of all dignity.  “If the step falters, even the elephant will fall,” Shakuni admonished the merry Pandavas.  The elephant was the royal animal of the...