Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Illustration by ChatGPT Evil has a peculiar charm, a charm which seems to belong to an alien world. But somewhere deep in our hearts we know that it is our own world, not an alien world. We romanticise it as Lost Paradise, Rama Rajya, Utopia, or whatever. That ‘romance’ is what I love about Emily Bronte’s novel, Wuthering Heights . Emily died at the age of 29. Most Romantics died young. But those Romantics like Keats and Shelley imagined beautiful worlds and died because their souls knew that such beautiful worlds were impossible. Emily was born just three years before Keats died and four years before Shelley followed Keats. But the literary age was changing to the more prudish Victorian morality as Emily grew up. Victorian morality was more than prudish. Women were supposed to be the western counterparts of India’s Satis, women who immolated themselves on their husbands’ funeral pyres. How could a woman like Emily Bronte, daughter of a Christian parson, born and brought up in a ...

Reading Mexico: Stories by Josh Barkan will make one think that Donald Trump’s demand for the border wall is justified.   Mexico comes across in these 12 stories as a country of drug dealers and their mafia along with prostitutes and quite many people who resort to violence without too much provocation.   The stories are set in the capital city where “To live ... you have to pretend there aren’t many dangers” [‘Everything else is going to be fine’]. Each of the twelve stories shocks us with a different variety of danger.   In the very first one, ‘The Chef and El Chapo’, we meet “the most badass narco in the country” who is ushered into the Chef’s restaurant by a retinue of his AK-47 swinging guards for a uniquely tasty meal.   The Chef is under duress to prepare that exquisite meal the type of which the Boss has not tasted so far.   The reputation of the Chef is at stake.   Worse, his life as well as those of the clients present in the restau...

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 selfis...

Farmers' Protest in Surat Source: The Indian Express The farmers in PM Modi’s own state poured litres of milk and threw kilograms of food grains on the road two days back in protest against the non-availability of valid currency.  There are protests in other states too against the restrictions put on cooperative banks on which farmers and small traders rely heavily. If we analyse the social media including blogs, we’ll discover that it is the middle class that supports Modi’s tilting at the windmills of black money.  The middle class has its own morality whose hypocrisy was exposed brilliantly by Bernard Shaw in the character of Alfred Doolittle.  The middle class pretends to be moral while it is far more immoral than any other class.  It will discover all the loopholes in any given system and use those loopholes for their most selfish purposes all the while assuming that they are the most patriotic, religious and righteous people in the world. The mi...

Platitudes and positive thoughts are like palliative drugs: they make us feel comfortable in a world full of evil and negativity.  Beyond the comforts of a drug, they provide little else.  Otherwise our world would have been a paradise by now because there is never a dearth of platitudes and positive thoughts thanks to the increasing number of religious activities, cults, gurus, and what not. The naked truth is that life is drenched in evil in spite of all the gurus and cults, motivational therapies and mass spiritual exercises.  Why? Social psychologist Philip Zimbardo proved experimentally that social situations affect individual personalities and stimulate behavioural patterns.  In simple words, we behave in certain ways because the society demands us to behave thus.  With little provocation, formerly good people will discard their values entirely, he showed.  It is easier to make people do bad things than good.  We are all susceptible...

Fantasy Atheist died and found himself before God.  God smiled at him more affectionately than any human being had ever done while he was on the earth. “I never imagined you existed outside human illusions and delusions.”  Atheist said with his usual candour having overcome his surprise. “On the earth,” God said slowly as if he was pondering over each word he uttered, “I don’t exist much except in human illusions and delusions.” “Oh!”  God’s reply was another surprise for Atheist. “Do you think if I actually existed on the earth as I really am there would be so much evil perpetrated in my name?” “Evil,” said Atheist. “And that too in your name.  That is exactly what me lose faith in you.” “I know. Because you had no faith in me, you were a good human being.  What if you had also started fighting in my name?” “Where am I?”  Atheist looked around. God laughed.  “In the presence of God.” “Heaven?” “Call...

“It is God’s omniscience that helps Him to endure the sorrows of the world,” says the narrator of Francois Mauriac’s short story, A Man of Letters.   Why would any God endure this world of ours for so long had it not been for the empathetic understanding of the criminality that underlies the crown of His own creation?  The question begs a lot of other questions, of course.  Is there a God, did He (is it He really?) create the universe, was He aware of the evil that he was giving birth to while creating the human beings...?  Michelangelo's The Pieta Let us assume that some God created the universe for reasons similar to why Dostoevsky wrote Crime and Punishment or Michelangelo carved the Pieta : a creative urge.  Not the whole of creation is under the control of the creator because there are unconscious motives which underlie every creation.  Sublimation of the darkness within the creator is one of the motives of creation. The human beings seem t...

Shamsudheen Fareed, a Salafi preacher in Kerala, has decided that Onam, Christmas and other such celebrations are haram.  A lot more things are haram in his version of Islam.  Movies are haram.  Even trimming the beard is! When a person convinces himself that he possesses the ultimate truths, he is destined to live in a bundle of delusions.  Simply because there are no ultimate truths.  Except in science and other rigid systems.  Even in those systems, truths are amenable to corrections.  An Einstein corrected a Newton.  Einstein’s theories are also not ultimate truths.  When it comes to human life and affairs, truths are never ultimate.  We keep learning and understanding them in our own way.  Source Joseph Conrad’s celebrated character, Kurtz ( Heart of Darkness ), is a good example of someone who deluded himself with his own ultimate truths.  He thought he possessed the ultimate truths and he wanted to civili...

Put a few children on an island with no adults to supervise them.  Watch from a distance what they do.  In no time you will have to intervene in order to save them from themselves. William Golding wrote a novel on that theme.  Lord of the Flies , the novel by the Nobel laureate, tells the story of some children who were marooned on an island.  Soon savagery dominates their life.  The benign Ralph loses to the bullying Jack.  Evil triumphs.  There is no childhood innocence.   There is only the savagery that marks humanity essentially. Three years before Lord of the Flies was published, American literature was blessed with J D Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (1954) which told the story of a 16 year-old boy, Holden Caulfield, whose dream was to preserve children’s innocence from the necessary corruption of adults.  Holden ends up in the loony bin.  One has to lose innocence if one is to remain sane in the human world. ...

Book Review Title: Maximum City: Bombay Lost & Found Author: Suketu Mehta Publisher: Penguin Books, 2004 Every city has a fascinating history that lies beneath its imposing concrete edifices.  It is the history written on invisible pages by people who will never appear in the actual history books, people like gangsters and prostitutes.  And the person on the street too.  Suketu Mehta’s magnum opus unravels that invisible history of Mumbai in a gripping narrative that reads almost like a novel. The book is divided into three parts.  Part 1, titled ‘Power’, constitutes almost half of the book and is about the people who actually wield the power in the city.  The book speaks about the Mumbai of 1990s and hence this part begins with the riots that assailed the city soon after the Babri Masjid demolition in Dec 1992.  The Muslims in Mumbai reacted against the Babri Kasjid demolition and Bal Thackeray’s Shiv Sena was quick to exploit the...

Dear God, I lost faith in you long ago.  You did nothing to reinstate my faith.  You don’t care either way, I guess.  When millions of innocent people have been killed brutally in your name (which may be spelt differently by different people) and you never seemed to bother a bit, why should the loss of faith by someone as insignificant as me bother you? Nevertheless, I’m curious.  Do you really care about anything at all?  I can put aside the earthquakes and tsunamis and other natural calamities in the name of natural laws which you might not like to fiddle with.  I prefer to see you as a law-abiding entity.  Then will arise a question: are you the creator of the cosmos or are you just a part of it? If you are the creator, couldn’t you have done a little better work?  Couldn’t you create creatures capable of a little less evil and a little more goodness?  Why was evil necessary at all?  Or is goodness impossible without evi...

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...