Tomichan Matheikal's blog

I have struggled with my ego for a very long period. In fact, right from childhood. I had an irresistible need to be always right. Every argument had to end with my word as the last. When people corrected my mistakes, I felt offended. I could never accept defeats with even the slightest of grace. These are all signs of an inflated ego. Somewhere in the middle of my life my ego was hammered into pulp by certain committed benefactors in Shillong. They did a good job because for years after that my ego didn’t raise its head. When your ego is under control, you are more aware of yourself. You know that you are wrong sometimes and you can admit your weaknesses and frailties without making a fuss about them. You make amends when you err and you wish to avoid errors as far as possible. You have the courage to apologise when errors still happen as they do invariably. When others hurt you, you learn not to take the hurts to the heart. You try to understand why others did it to you. You are

“A corpse can be revived,” says Frank Hunter to Andrew Crocker-Harris in Terence Rattigan’s one-act play, The Browning Version . Andrew is a martyr because he refuses to assert himself where required.  He knows that his wife, Millie, is unfaithful to him.  In fact she enjoys taunting him by telling him about her affairs with his colleagues.  Andrew continues to tolerate her because he thinks divorcing her would be “another grave wrong” he would do to her.  What’s the other wrong he had done her?  Frank asks.  “To marry her,” answers Andrew. Andrew and Millie are total mismatches.  Millie is sensuous and earthy.  Andrew is intellectual and ethereal.  “Two kinds of love,” Andrew explains.  “Worlds apart as I know now, though when I married her I didn’t think they were incompatible.”  Andrew wanted affection and companionship, the emotional delights of love.  Millie wanted the physical delights.  Andrew thought that the kind of love he required was superior and never imagined

“(Sorrow) will strike you harder than your husbands because your ego is more frail and more stubborn...” says Krishna to Draupadi in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s novel, ThePalace of Illusions . The word ego is used here in its commonly understood meaning of ‘the extent to which one thinks highly of one’s self.’  In psychology, the meaning of ego is not quite that, though related to it.  Ego is a self-consciousness system in psychology.  Ego is that part of our consciousness which tells our own story to ourselves as well as others.  It is the story that is made up of our thoughts, feelings and actions.  It is the story which inhibits or legitimises our thoughts, feelings and actions to ourselves as well as others.  My ego is my story as I create it moment after moment.  It is shaped by my experiences in life.  It is the identity I forge as I go ahead in life.  If I cannot forge a meaningful identity which gives purpose to my existence, I have ego problems.  Let us look

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.  The entire school complex inc

The violinist played the last note with a solemn sway of the bow and then bowed to the audience with a proud panache.  His heart longed for an applause.  Then came one clap from somewhere.  Two.  A few more.  And it spread across the auditorium.  The ego of the violinist was pleased. It’s only much later he learnt that most people in the auditorium were deaf.  Still later he learnt that the two or three people who initiated the applause were bribed to do so. Apparently the above is a moral science story meant to teach humility.  The sheer truth is that the writer of the story was flexing his ego by writing it.  I have adapted the story from Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), great philosopher.  He told the story with the intention of accusing his audience (readers) of metaphorical deafness.  He wanted to prove that his readers lacked the brains to understand him. Schopenhauer Schopenhauer had published his masterpiece, The World as Will and Idea .  In his letter t

The Beas sparkled like molten silver with the gentle touch of the morning sun.  It could not assuage the mutiny that was mounting among Alexander’s soldiers, however. How long and how far?  Coenus, the general of Alexander’s army, raised the question.  We have come a long way in search of some mirage.  We have bathed in the Tigris and the Indus, played in the Nile and the Euphrates, sailed across the Oxus and the Jaxartes.  We breathed the air of deserts, mountains, steppes and fields.  We trudged miles and miles, thousands of miles.  Of victory, booty, glory and novelty, we’ve had our fill. Alexander looked into Coenus’s eyes. He saw longing in them.  Longing for wife.  For children.  Father and mother.  No harlot can ever replace the touch of the wife.  No victory can match the smiles of your children.  Eight years.  They’ve been away from their homeland for eight years. But we are conquerors, said Alexander.  Conquest is our way, our life, and our truth.  There is no

“Society is necessary, yet inevitably corrupting.”  This is a theme that appears repeatedly in Joseph Conrad’s novels, according literary critic David Daiches.  One of the worst things that can happen to us is to be destined to live in a society that blatantly refuses to recognise our achievements.  It becomes worse still when there is a concerted attempt to belittle us for reasons like jealousy.  The plain truth is that we all seek to be loved by the world whether we admit it or not.  We need the attention of other people though it may not be in the form of love.  The human ego is a “leaky balloon, forever requiring helium of external love to remain inflated, and ever vulnerable to the smallest pinpricks of neglect,” as Alain de Bottom said in his book Status Anxiety . Society is the place where we get that indispensable helium from.  When we buy a car that’s better than the neighbour’s or send our child to a better school, we are in fact inflating the ego-balloon.  Accor

Fiction “MY prayer for today,” he would begin the morning assembly every day with those words. My, I, mine – his vocabulary went little beyond that. “My school,” he was referring to his previous school which was supposed to have some fame because it was situated within a dead king’s renovated fort. And his new school had a living wall, a wall that he constantly built anew by raising its height.  He never felt secure outside a dead king’s fort. “Why did he become a Principal?”  Wondered Manmohan, an average teacher with average brains. “Dead kings’ forts stimulate royal ambitions,” consoled Mrs Manmohan, an average teacher with average brains. The Principal’s favourite team lost the cricket match.  The Principal was furious.  “How can MY team lose?”  He thundered. He galloped towards his car, pulled the door open, sat in the driver’s seat and drove the car backward.  As far as the backward ride was possible. Then he felt at ease.