Tomichan Matheikal's blog

A friend sent me the other day two articles on Soren Kierkegaard which reminded me of the bicentenary of the Danish philosopher’s birth.  Philosophers, probably, belong to a species that’s becoming extinct.  Nevertheless, it’s worthwhile, if not necessary, to take a glance at some of the old philosophies.  Kierkegaard’s most famous phrase is “leap into faith.”  The philosopher argued that there is a profound insecurity in human life.  Life is one contingency after another.  The only certainty is death.  The other certainties or truths have to be created by each one of us as we move through life. What is required in the process is the willingness to risk a leap of faith.  Becoming human is a project , argued Kierkegaard.  Our task is not so much to discover who we are but to create ourselves at every moment.  Kierkegaard identified 3 stages of life experience. 1.        The aesthetic : T...

‘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 po...

Courtesy: The Hindu The literary world is celebrating the 60 th Anniversary of the first performance of Samuel Beckett’s short play, Waiting for Godot .  It was first staged on 5 Jan 1953 in Paris.  Though it has no plot in the conventional sense, it went on to create history in literature.  It established a new convention in drama called the Theatre of the Absurd .  True, dramatists like Ionesco and Arthur Adamov had already written plays in that convention in 1950.  But Beckett catapulted the genre into limelight. Estragon and Vladimir are the two major characters in the play.  They are beggarly creatures waiting in a desolate street for someone called Godot.  But they are not sure whether they really have this appointment, nor whether they are in the right place.  They don’t know why they are waiting for Godot.  In fact, they are not even sure of their own names.  While waiting, they indulge in seemingly meaningless...