Tomichan Matheikal's blog

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect,” said Mark Twain.  Some members of the ruling BJP seem to have become so intoxicated with power that they are ranting and raving like people bereft of their sense.  It is time for them to pause and reflect.  And it is time for the Prime Minister to pause his reflection. A few days ago, Sakshi Maharaj advised the Hindu women of India to have four children each.  Now the Shankaracharya of Badrikashram orders the Hindu women to have ten children each.  Of course, the women aren’t so foolish as to take such exhortations to heart.  So nothing will change.  Yet it is worth asking the question: What motivates the Maharaj and the Acharya (supposedly wise people) to make such statements?  Do they think that the population of India is skewed against the Hindus?  Below are two diagrams that illustrate the population of people belonging to different religions, according to the 2011 Census of India

A madrasa in Mandsaur Courtesy The Hindu Hindus and Muslims still live together in India cooperating with each other.  Today’s Hindu newspaper carries a report on the front page with the headline ‘ Mandsaur’s inclusive madrasas .’  Mandsaur is a district in Madhya Pradesh which has 128 madrasas with a total of 5500 students.  In 78 of these madrasas, Hindu students outnumber their Muslim friends, says the report.  630 of the 865 teachers are Hindus.  Images of goddess Saraswati and Ajmer Sharif coexist in peace and harmony on the walls of the classrooms.  One must be thankful to The Hindu , I thought as I read the report, for highlighting such inclusiveness when far too many Indians are driven crazy by religious fundamentalism.  This blog post is my humble attempt to express my gratitude to the newspaper as much as for celebrating the inclusiveness. It is also an earnest plea. One of the questions I have raised time and again in the classroom as a teacher is how many o

More than a hundred innocent children were killed by the Taliban today in Pakistan’s Peshawar.  Many were injured.  Teachers were burnt alive.  All in the name of religion. Nurturing a cruel thought in your mind implies you are cruel.  I remember having read something to that effect long ago in Dag Hammarskjold’s little classical diary, Markings .  How cruel must one be in order to line up innocent children and fire bullets into their hearts?  And they call that religion! Like most religious fundamentalist organisations, the Taliban was born out of a conflicting mix of passions: hatred towards certain sections of people and a childish longing for an ideal world .  Mullah Omar was a barely literate jihadi who had lost his right eye fighting the Russians in Afghanistan.  In 1994 he witnessed a local warlord eliminating an entire family, not before raping every girl in it.  The incident put the fire in the romantic soul of Mullah Omar.  He vowed to restore the true sha

With the American first family - Exactly a year ago  Malala Yousafzai is a symbol of human aspirations.  What did she want apart from the simple things of life?  Nothing.  She wanted education, freedom to live her life as she would choose, and the space to dream.  Why didn’t people give her that?  When she was shot point-blank as she was returning home from school, it was the innocence and aspirations of childhood that was assaulted.  Malala was just 15 years old when she became the target of religious fundamentalists.  She was a child.  Why would a child be a threat to any religion?  What kind of a religion is it that permits the murder of innocent children?  The masked Taliban gunman who attacked Malala asked, “"Which one of you is Malala? Speak up, otherwise I will shoot you all."  His religious fervour was such that he could kill a whole lot of innocent school children.  No normal human being can understand the relevance or meaning of such a religion. “I h

Book Review Title: Our Moon Has Blood Clots Author: Rahul Pandita Publisher: Random House India, 2013, 2014   ISBN: 978-81-8400-513-4 Pages: 257 Price: Rs 350 History has to be saved from the mediocre.  The mediocre rule the world.  And their vision extends little beyond their own noses.  Their memory goes as far as the comforts and wellbeing of themselves.  “… my memory must come in the way of this untrue history,” as Rahul Pandita paraphrases Agha Shahid Ali.  The memory of those who find it difficult to accept convenient truths that ensure the present wellbeing must come in the way if history is to be redeemed.  Rahul Pandita’s book is an endeavour to redeem the history of the Kashmiri Pandits who were driven out by the Muslim fundamentalists.  The book deserves to be read by every Indian, especially by the Muslims of India. Kashmir was a paradise where people belonging to two different religions, which later became bitter enemies, lived together in exe

Religions have an uncanny knack for making people intellectually blind.  The latest example for religious blindness is the withdrawal by its publishers (Penguin) of Wendy Doniger’s book, The Hindus: An Alternative History . Doniger quotes in a letter to the press :  “An example at random, from the lawsuit in question: ‘That YOU NOTICEE has hurt the religious feelings of millions of Hindus by declaring that Ramayana is a fiction. “Placing the Ramayan in its historical contexts demonstrates that it is a work of fiction, created by human authors, who lived at various times……….” (P.662) This breaches section 295A of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). ‘  Doniger is an accomplished scholar on Hinduism.  It is absurd that ignorant people are questioning her scholarship and trying to ban it from public access.  Ramayana may not be the only bone of contention in this case.  However, since Doniger has mentioned that explicitly in her letter, let me quote some relevant passages from

In 1978, the Catholic theologian Hans Kung raised a few pertinent questions in his book, Does God Exist?   “Has religion any future?   Can we not have morality even without religion?   Is not science sufficient?   Has not religion developed out of magic?   Will it not perish in the process of evolution?   Is not God from the outset a projection of man (Feuerbach), opium of the people (Marx), resentment of those who have fallen short (Nietzsche), illusion of those who have remained infantile (Freud)? …” The decades that followed proved that the theologian’s anxieties were ill-founded.   Religious fundamentalism of all sorts flourished in the 1990s all over the world.   The communist USSR collapsed politically as well as ideologically, and people began to flock toward religions perhaps in order to fill the vacuum left by the Marxist ideology that had vanished.   Samuel P Huntington says in his book The Clash of Civilizations and the remaking of world order , “In 1994, 30 percent