Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Easter brings to mind the resurrection of Jesus.  But Easter was celebrated even before Jesus.  It was a spring festival.  Many states in India have similar festivals.  Vishu in Kerala and Bihu in Assam are examples.  In Western literary traditions, winter symbolises death and spring is the harbinger of new life.  “April is the cruellest month,” begins T S Eliot’s classical poem, The Waste Land . The Eliotean waste land is a metaphor for the aridity of modern life.  In such a world there is only perpetual winter, winter that keeps us warm.  Our life is no better than death, implies Eliot.  We live death-in-life existence clutching lifeless roots in “this stony rubbish”.  Easter, or resurrection as it has come to mean today, is a celebration of new life.  Spring comes with a new life that stirs up the dull roots that lay beneath the snow in winter, to use the Eliotean metaphor.   The whole Christian conc...

Historical Fiction “I’m going to die,” declared Diogenes.  He was 96.  By the time you reach the age of 96 you will have acquired the wisdom to know when to die.  You can have such wisdom even earlier.  Depends on what life taught you.  Rather what you cared to learn from life. Diogenes was on a street in Corinth.  Dying.  The street was his home.  When the weather was too good outside he chose to get into a barrel.  Somebody had gifted him that barrel.  Why somebody?  Greece was mad enough to understand the madness of Diogenes and appreciate it.  But Greece was not so mad that Diogenes was prompted to declare with the certainty that comes only to godmen that “Most men are within a finger’s breadth of being mad.” “It takes a wise man to discover a wise man,” declared Diogenes with the same godman-certainty when Xeniades of Corinth bought him from the slave dump.  He had been sold as a slave by one o...