Tomichan Matheikal's blog

In George Eliot’s novel, Silas Marner , the eponymous hero is a man who felt deceived by both god and man.  His close friend deceived him by implicating him in a theft committed by the former.  Since Marner was known for his honesty and goodness, the matter was taken to God.  The lot drawn before God after the ritual of a prayer incriminated Marner again.  The worst stab in the innocent heart of Marner was when his fianceé abandoned him to marry the man who had done the terrible injustice to him. Marner leaves the place heartbroken and settles down in Raveloe as a solitary weaver who does not socialise at all.  He cannot bring himself to join any human company.  He has lost faith in mankind.  He has lost faith in God too.  However, when he sees Sally Oates suffering from the same disease which his mother had suffered from, the natural goodness in Marner well up.  He prepares a concoction for Sally and it heals her.  Marner becomes famous in Raveloe as a man with occult powers

Book Review “I’ve done some things I shouldn’t have, I want to put them right....” “Hard to put things right.  You don’t often get that chance.  Sometimes all you can do is not get caught.” [Page 550, The Goldfinch , Donna Tartt, London: Little, Brown, 2013] Dona Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Goldfinch , is a tour de force that explores the theme of growing up in a world which is an inextricable mix of good and evil, beauty and filth.  Theo Decker, the protagonist and first person narrator of the novel, is thirteen years old when he loses his mother to a bomb explosion in the Metropolitan museum in New York.  Their father, an alcoholic gambler, had already abandoned them.  Theo’s world turns upside down after his mother’s death.  All the love and security he needed as a young adolescent is stolen by the tragedy.  He is taken care of by the Barbours until his father comes to claim him learning that much money had been put aside by Mrs Decker for Theo’s educa

Chandigarh has a series of museums all adjacent to one another. They are an excellent place to spend a day especially if you are in Chandigarh during summer.  You can engage yourself learning much about history, music, art, architecture, and so on.   The Goddess welcomes you to the Museum The Buddha - 2nd century AD sculpture Maitreya Maitreya, according to Buddhist literature, is the future Buddha. He will come when people will have forgotten dharma and will be living in sheer evil. Similar beliefs are found in many religions. Didn't Lord Krishna promise Arjuna, "... Sambhavami yuge yuge"? The Bible promises a Second Coming of Jesus.  People were always aware of their own innate wickedness.  But instead of working on it in order to alleviate it if not eradicate, people chose to believe in some deity who would come and eradicate it.  Just one of the many futile absurdities of human existence! Gods are the most potent tools for man's escapist gam

Silas Marner, the eponymous hero of George Eliot’s novel, is too good for the ordinary human society.  He has a childlike trust in both man and God.  He loses that trust, both in man and God, when he is falsely accused of theft.  He leaves the place and settles down in a richer place where he lives a very lonely life.  People view him with fear and suspicion; fear because they believe that he has some magical powers since he cured someone’s illness that was considered incurable.  They do not believe him when he says he has no magical powers.  Marner is a good weaver and the profession brings him a lot of money.  His single obsession and source of joy becomes the gold and silver coins he amasses over the years.  But one day his fabulous wealth is stolen.  Marner is faced with a terrible sense of emptiness within.  His present situation elicits some sympathy from the people.  Marner’s life undergoes a radical change when a three year-old child walks into his house one day. 

Fiction Father Joseph woke up from sleep with a tremor running down his spine.  His body was drenched with sweat.  This had become a routine now: a nightmare would kill his sleep halfway through it. In his nightmares he was a sorcerer, or a witch hunter, or a medieval knight tilting at some mysterious windmills.  He dispensed magical potions and panaceas to the people who came and knelt down in front of him with childlike trust.  He drove a stake into the heart of every sinner in the parish.  He led some amorphous army to he knew not where.  Every dream ended with somebody like John the Baptist making a mocking apparition to him and accusing him of cardinal sins of all hues.  Often the Baptist had only the head; there was no body.  There was fury in his mockery.  His words lashed out like lightning and thunder.  Father Joseph put on his white soutane as he got ready for his morning meditation.  He spent an hour every morning in silent prayer and meditation before the pa

One of the phone calls that greeted me this New Year’s Day drove me to some serious contemplation.  The friend quoted the example of Galileo who retracted his scientific theory before the religious Inquisitors and later explained his action: “Science doesn’t need martyrs.” My meditation led me to the notion of freedom provided by the 17 th century philosopher, Spinoza.  He argued that we were not totally free.  We are controlled by certain inescapable laws of nature as well as our genetic makeup.  Evil is also an essential part of nature.  “The evil which ensues from evil deeds is not therefore less to be feared because it comes of necessity;” said Spinoza, “whether our actions are free or not, our motives still are hope and fear.” Hope for a better future; fear about the present situation.  The martyr is not afraid for himself; his fear is about the future of the society.  Martyrdom need not be a virtue. To be really great is not to be placed above humanity, ruling

Kiss me, Kiss me with the poison on your lips So that I’m energised To survive in your world.

“Civilization is skin-thin: scratch it and savagery bleeds out.”  [Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Civilizations ] Nobel laureate William Golding’s first novel, Lord of the Flies (1954), tells the story of a group of school boys plane-wrecked on an uninhabited island.  The leadership of the democratic and sensitive Ralph is soon usurped by the savage Jack, and childhood innocence soon gives way to uncanny cruelty on the island.  The novel is the story of evil in the human being and his society. Seeing that there are no adults to restrain them, the children are initially excited.  But Ralph emerges as a leader reminding them of their responsibility to find ways of returning home.  Ralph is a moral character in the novel.  His is a cultivated morality, the product of human civilisation.  Jack, on the other hand, is the uncultivated savage.  He soon wrenches the leadership from Ralph and becomes a dictator who imposes both his will and his savagery on the group.  Most of the ch

Evil is coeval with mankind.  Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400) said repeatedly in his widely studied Canterbury Tales , “ Love of money is the root of all evil .”  How much can we alter that statement today, six centuries later? When Christopher Marlowe (1564-93) made his unforgettable Doctor Faustus utter the following lines:             Had I as many souls as there be stars,             I’d give them all for Mephistophilis, he created a character who would be perfectly at home in our own time with all its plethora of sensual delights .    Now, how evil are sensual delights? “ Fair is foul, and foul is fair ,” said Shakespeare’s (1564-1616) witches in Macbeth .  They were expressing something much more than an epigram on hypocrisy or political chicanery.  If we want, we can even apply the epigram to many of the contemporary sensual delights. We can apply that witchy epigram, moreover, to a lot of things today.  The law today, for example, protects the foul.

Book Review Barry Fairbrother dies giving rise to a vacancy in the Parish council.  There are many aspirants for the vacant post.  J K Rowling’s novel, The Casual Vacancy , is partly about the struggles of the aspirants to materialise their dream.  The novel is more about such social issues as juvenile aberration, pornography, drug addiction, and child abuse.  The novel presents a terribly bleak and partly frivolous world.  Linguistic obscenity hangs heavily on the reader’s mind as he/she turns pages hoping to see some light at the end of the tunnel.  But all that you will get is more and more darkness.  Rowling is writing about a society that shrugs at revelations of evil.  A character in the novel, the adolescent Stuart “Fats” Wall, tries to defeat his father in the Parish council election by hacking into the council’s website and posting a report that his father was a thief, only to realise that “the world, it seemed, had merely shrugged.  Evil is a natural concomitant

“Why Blame Religion?” asks Matthew Adukanil in an article of that title published in the Open Page of The Hindu (Oct 13).  [In the online edition of the paper the title is Blame it on politics, not religion .]  The article is a response to an earlier article by Vasant Natarajan, Let’s aim for a post-theistic society .  While Prof Natarajan’s article was a rational and sensible argument why we should strive to create a world without religions, Prof Adukanil’s is sheer trivia fit for catechism classes. Religion and science “are twins, one imparting wisdom and the other knowledge,” argues Adukanil.  There are many problems with such statements.  For example: Does religion really provide wisdom?  If it does, why is it the cause of so much misery in the world?  Why has it engendered so many crusades, holy wars, jihads, terrorists, and other appalling evils?  What about the numerous atheists and agnostics who were/are wise?  Aren’t they proof that religion is not at all necessar

Book Review Author:            Javier Marias Translated from Spanish by: Margaret Jull Costa Publisher:        Hamish Hamilton, 2013 Pages:  346 This is a novel that revolves round a murder mystery, but there is not a single police officer or detective in it.  There is no investigation of the murder because the murderer is an insane person with a motive.  The narrator of the novel, Maria, knows more.  There is a cunning person behind the murderer, and Maria learns soon that “the most powerful and most cunning of people never dirty their own hands or their own tongue.”  They know how to do the dirty deeds by using other people as instruments.  The novel is about such people.  The novel is about the prevalence of evil in human life.  Right from the beginning of the human civilisation we find the same kind of crimes repeated endlessly, ad nauseam.  “The worst thing is that so many disparate individuals in every age and every country – each on his own account and at

In a relatively old Malayalam movie, Kizhakkan Pathrose , the protagonist is a criminal.  One day he goes to a Catholic priest who is involved in many charitable works and says, “I have committed a lot of crimes and caused much pain to many people.  I want to atone for it all by making a donation for noble causes.”  The priest accepts the cheque without saying a word. “This is not atonement,” I blurted out while watching the movie a few minutes back on a TV channel. “Why not?” asked Maggie, my wife, the only other person present in the room. Courtesy: Internet “Real atonement is only when the person gives up his criminal ways.  The rest is commerce.  This fellow is trying to buy atonement with money and the priest is his accomplice.” Maggie was about to say something but suppressed it.  I did not succeed in making her speak.  I think she wanted to say that I was a silly idealist. “Put God to work for you and maximise your potential in our divinely ordered ca

Sreesanth has a lot of fans in his home state of Kerala.  Some of his fans took out a procession to show their support as well as to solicit others’ sympathy.  A few of them seem to think that the cricketer is innocent.  The thinking of quite many of them,however, may deserve a serious scrutiny. That thinking was reflected in a TV programme presented by the Malayalam channel, Asianet, yesterday.  The crux of the programme’s argument is: There is rampant corruption in India.  There are politicians as well as others who make crores of rupees through fraudulent means.  Why single out Sreesanth?   There’s a similar issue being discussed in Kerala these days.  A Malayalam actor, Kalabhavan Mani, was involved in a drunken brawl with some forest guards.  Mani beat up some of the guards and is now absconding.  Yesterday the ADGP of Kerala’s Intelligence Bureau, T P Senkumar, came out with an interesting argument.  He asked whether the police would have dealt in the same way with a

The Hindu editorial [May 17, 2013] invokes Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase, ‘the banality of evil,’ in order to underscore the corruption that has infiltrated Indian cricket, particularly the IPL.  In simple words what Arendt meant by the phrase was that monstrous evils are not usually perpetrated by fanatics or psychopaths but by ordinary people who fail to think deeply or seriously enough. Failure to think seriously enough is a very common trait of our contemporary civilisation.  Ours is a civilisation which has nearly killed philosophy and serious literature.  It is a civilisation built up on the single premise of materialism and propagated assiduously by the United States of America using institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank.  It is a civilisation which encourages consumerism and superficial pleasures of life.  It is a civilisation whose singular password is commerce. Trade greases the wheels of our civilisation.  And everything is a commodity which can

‘The Guest’ is a short story by Nobel laureate, Albert Camus.  It tells the story of Daru, a schoolteacher, who lives in his “schoolhouse” on a remote hillside “almost like a monk”.  One day a gendarme brings an Arab who killed his cousin in a family squabble to Daru’s schoolhouse.  Since it is wartime Daru is asked to take the murderer the next day to the police headquarters which is 20 km away.  Daru thinks it is a dishonourable job handing over any person to the police.  He hates the Arab for committing the crime.  He tells the gendarme that he will disobey the order in spite of the latter’s warning about the consequences.  And disobey he does.  The Arab is left untied in the night.  When he gets up and goes outside Daru hopes that he will run away.  But he returns to bed soon.  Daru takes him the next day having given him enough food to last for two days, instructs him about the way through the mountains to the police headquarters, tells him where he can find a resti

  “The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”   The realization dawned upon the Biblical God pretty early (Genesis 6: 5).   It didn’t take too many generations down from Adam and Eve for God to come to the regret that “he had made man on the earth” (6: 6).    So God decided to “blot out man whom I have created from the face of the ground, man and beast and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.”   Gods are not known for rationality, whatever their religion.   The Biblical God is as whimsical as any counterpart of his.   Having condemned the creatures as unworthy of existence and fit only to be drowned in a deluge, God decides to save Noah and his family as well as “seven pairs of all clean animals, the male and his mate; and a pair of the animals that are not clean, the male and his mate; and seven pairs of the birds of the air also, male a