Tomichan Matheikal's blog

A Palestinian child whose dear ones were killed Pic from Malayalam weekly   They are killing each other because their gods are different. Each of the gods is a jealous entity. Yahweh, the God of the Jews, admitted his own jealousy. He told the Jews, his chosen race, “For you shall worship no other god, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God.” [Exodus 20:4] Allah of Islam makes no less claims. While Yahweh allows other gods to exist, Allah apparently isn’t as generous as that. La ilaha illallah. Both these gods together have caused endless misery on the earth. They have made their chosen people squeamishly narrowminded and incapable of living in harmony with others. Why on earth did anyone think of putting these two people together on a desert? Mahatma Gandhi was right. He was against the creation of Israel as a country for the Jews. He was not one who would give credence to fairy tales such as a race being God’s favourite and so on. “I am not moved by the argument that the Jews

One of the many messages that Richard Bach’s Illusions proffers is that once we have climbed certain peaks we won’t descend. Once we have reached certain heights, we will spread our wings and fly. Once we have reached certain standards, nothing less will satisfy us. When the knight in John Keats’s poem, La Belle Dame Sans Merci , encountered the ideal beauty, he refused to be satisfied with anything less and spent his entire life pursuing that beauty in spite of its fatal elusiveness. If you meet your god, how will that encounter alter your life? Those who touch the divine can never be satisfied with the mundane routines of existence. Stating that same truth in another way: If you are just another ordinary person on the earth, you have not touched the divine. You have not met your god. Your god is only an idol in the temple or the church or some such place. There are umpteen religions in the human world. There are countless gods. But evil keeps mounting. And pretty much of

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 what you wish.  Names matter littl

“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 to be the darkness that la

One of the first roses that bloomed in my little garden The following poem was inspired by it.  Why do you look so penitent like Tagore’s flowe r that asked the master to pluck it without delay lest it droop and drop into dust? Aren’t we all made for the dust? You leave me wondering, however, whether it’s the same master that created the night’s worm which seeks out your bed of crimson joy . Isn’t the worm made for the dust too?

George Steiner God is always present in a good work of art, literature and music.  George Steiner says that in his book, Real Presences .  That God enters our being and asks us to change ourselves.  Good literature, art and music have the power to change us.  They touch our souls, in other words.  Psychology tells us that a lot of our attitudes and behaviour are determined by our subconscious mind.  The subconscious mind is the seat of all the suppressed emotions which can take the shape of the devil at times –  when we lose our cool, for example. It is this subconscious mind that good literature touches, that good music soothes or good art cools.  The suppressed feelings undergo transformation under the influence of good art, literature or music.  That transformative power is God, in Steiner’s words. Aristotle gave it a more secular name: catharsis. The process of writing is also deeply related to the subconscious mind.  Our themes and imagery, our style and diction, t

Sunday Musings If I do not want to go to heaven, whose business is it to decide otherwise for me?  I have come across scores of people who insist on deciding what I should or should not do so that my soul is saved from perdition. They have taken much pain to attach too many strings all along my way and pull them in certain directions applying the torque of their calculation so that my soul is not lost for eternity.  It always baffled me why my soul was so important to them when there were/are millions of other people who stand in genuine need of benevolence. When I stumbled on Emile Durkheim recently I got some kind of an answer.  God is a lever with which people are elevated to heaven using the fulcrum of religion.  No, Durkheim didn’t say it in those words.  I’m paraphrasing him.  But why does anyone take the trouble to do all that leveraging?  Because every society seeks order, a social system.  And God is the most effective tool for forging that system.  All those p

Ludwig Feuerbach  The 19 th century was a century of revolutionary changes in human thinking.  People started questioning religion openly without fear.  The Romantic Movement questioned the absolutisms of classicism.  Karl Marx laid the axe at the root of the traditional social hierarchies.  In spite and because of Marx, capitalism broke a million more traditions. Industrialisation pulled people out of family-based work, colonialism led to miscegenation of different races and cultures, the Enlightenment of the previous centuries conquered new heights in human consciousness, women began to assert themselves against the strictures of patriarchy and religion was forced to take a backseat.   Ludwig Feuerbach is one of the many philosophers who redefined divinity for the thinking man (and woman, of course) in the century of various upheavals.  The leading religions of the time had externalised God and put Him (not Her , significantly) somewhere out there – Heaven or some such p

  Job Job is one of the classical characters in the Old Testament of the Bible who is used by various preachers of Christianity to illustrate the ideals of patience, suffering and submission of the individual will to God’s will.  Job was a “perfect and upright man” and hence was a favourite of God.  He lived a rich and contented life with his good wife, seven sons, three daughters, countless servants, lot of land and herds of cattle.  The devil challenged God saying that if Job’s prosperity was taken away then he would lose his trust in God as well as his virtues.  God gives a free hand to the devil who goes on to wreck Job’s life totally.  Job’s cattle are stolen, servants have their throats slit by enemies, sheep are burnt to death, and his children are killed when a fierce storm knocks down his house.  When none of these tragedies succeeds in eroding Job’s trust in God, the devil inflicts a severe skin disease on him.  When Job scratches his worm-ridden body with a pie

Aristophanes, Greek playwright, was a contemporary of Socrates, the philosopher.  In his play, The Clouds , a philosopher named Socrates operates a ‘Thinkery’ which dismisses the gods. Socrates is questioned by his neighbour, a farmer. “Who makes it rain if there is no Zeus?” asks the farmer. “The clouds,” answers Socrates.  “If it were Zeus who made the rain, the clouds would not be required at all.  Zeus could make the rain from a clear sky too.” “It must be Zeus who moves the clouds to the sky,” insists the farmer. “No, you idiot,” says the impatient Socrates, “it’s the Convection-principle.” “Convection!” the farmer wonders whether that’s a new god.  “So Zeus is out and convection is in.  Tch, tch!”  He thinks awhile and asks, “What about the lightning?  It must be Zeus who sends the lightning to kill liars.” “It’s Zeus’s own temples that are frequently struck down by lightning,” mocks Socrates.  The philosopher goes on to demonstrate a large model of th

Philosopher Gabriel Marcel drew an interesting distinction between problem and mystery.  Problems have solutions, he said, while mysteries are to be enjoyed unsolved.  “Life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived” is an aphorism attributed to Marcel.  Too many things lie beyond our capacity for solutions.  The earthquakes and the cyclones belong to the nonhuman side of the universe, beyond human control.  When the variegated colours and sounds of nature enchant us we are immersing ourselves in the mystery of the same nonhuman universe.  The universe does not comprehend the difference between the shifting of the tectonic plates and the warbling of the nightingale, between a shipwreck and a swan’s neck.  The heavens are indifferent whether lightning strikes down the greatest monument or Beethoven composes the sweetest symphony.  The sense of wonder or despair belongs to the human consciousness.  The heavens are above and beyond the need for wonder as well

I say 90 per cent of Indian are idiots.  You people don’t have brains in your heads.... It is so easy to take you for a ride.  You mad people will start fighting amongst yourself (sic), not realizing that some agent provocateur is behind a mischievous gesture of disrespect to a place of worship. Today 80 per cent Hindus are communal and 80 per cent Muslims are communal.  This is the harsh truth, bitter truth that I am telling you.  In 150 years, you have gone backwards instead of moving forward because the English kept injecting poison. Justice Katju Justice Markandey Katju, retired judge of the Supreme Court of India, said those words in a seminar organised by the South Asia Media Commission on 8 Dec 2012 in Delhi.  Now he tells us in his blog that Mahatma Gandhi was “an agent of the British.” He lists three reasons. 1.      By injecting religion into politics, Gandhi helped the British policy of ‘divide and rule.’ 2.      Gandhi’s satyagraha diverted the revoluti

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 evil?  Are you also a blend of both? What about

Subramaniam had no idea where he had been.  All he could remember was the shipwreck and the lifeboat which he was pushed on to along with a few others.  The huge waves that tossed the boat up and down. When he opened his eyes a few men, naked except for the rags tied round their groins, were standing round his staring into his eyes.  There was fear in those eyes as much as curiosity.  A couple of the men carried a bow and arrow each.  It didn’t take him long to realise that he had landed up on the island of some primitive people.  His ship had wrecked in the South Indian Ocean.  The people spoke a language that was curiously similar to Subramaniam’s own.  After all, his was a classical language, one of the oldest in the sub-continent called India, one which withstood many onslaughts from languages of the North.  At any rate, his ability to communicate with the island people did not surprise Subramaniam too much since he had read Gulliver’s Travels and knew that Gulliver co

“The question is how qualitative you want your life to be,” said Satan.  “True,” replied Eve.  “In fact, this life is quite boring.” “This is not the only life that’s open before you.  What you’re now doing is to live like animals.  You and Adam are just like the elephants or the goats or the fish or the birds.  You wake up in the morning, search for food, eat, rest, mate in the season and go to sleep.” “What else is there to do?” wondered Eve. “That’s precisely what I’m going to teach you,” Satan beamed with a kind of glee that could exist only in the hell.  “Imagine that you combine this animal life with the consciousness of the spirits.” Satan paused.  Eve had begun to imagine.  But her imagination got stuck on the word ‘consciousness.’ “Mind, thinking, awareness...” Satan tried to explain.  Eve stared at him blinking in ignorance. “See, the life of a pure spirit is boring too; more boring than that of the animals’.  The animals can at least eat and m

Madhuri had reasons to be chagrined: her idol had deserted her.  She had deserted her family, defied her beloved father, to live with her idol, the famous novelist Amitabh Sinha.  Her devotion to the idol was such that she took all the necessary precaution to avoid getting pregnant.  Children would divert her devotion from her idol.  Five years of selfless worship.  Yet he deserted her.  What’s unbearable was that he took as his beloved the woman whom Madhuri hated the most.  Sheila the witch with her two kids one of whom was a moron.  Madhuri had first fallen in love with Amitabh’s novels.  The love grew into admiration and it spread like a contagious disease from the creation to the creator.  “Don’t trust writers and such people,” Madhuri was warned by her father.  “They can’t love anyone except themselves and their works.” Madhuri was sure that Amitabh would love her.  How can a god ignore his most ardent devotee? Such devotion brings devastation when it is s