Tomichan Matheikal's blog

People are not as bad as they appear. They are worse, Oscar Wilde would quip. They are better, much better, deep inside provided you care to see, Clare Pooley would chide Wilde. The People on Platform 5 is Clare Pooley’s novel which is more inspiring than most inspirational literature and more motivating than most motivational books. It belongs to a new genre. Feel-good fiction is a new genre, I guess. This book belongs to that class and it deserves an eminent place there. This novel brings some strangers together on a train from Hampton Court to London Waterloo and back. These people are all regular commuters on that train as they go to work in the morning at the same time and return home in the evening, at the same time again, every day. They see each other regularly. But they don’t know each other, they don’t care to know either. That’s how people in cities are. But a medical emergency brings a few of these people close to one another. And there begins the story of this nov...

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...

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 beco...

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...

“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 the...

I’m not fond of long vacations.   Work keeps me engaged and happy.   This is the first time I took a long holiday (one full month) in Kerala.   I needed it. One of the first persons I met after returning to Delhi (whose afternoon sun reeked of malice and vengeance in stark contrast with the monsoon that drummed a relentless yet enchanting rhythm on the roof of my brother’s car as he drove us to the Cochin airport) was the boss of a commercial conglomerate in the national capital.   I met him this morning, two days after I reached Delhi.   Why didn’t I meet anyone in these two days?   People seem to be hiding themselves somewhere on the campus.   Did I smell fear on the campus?   Not even the children played in the courtyard of the staff quarters as they used to do till late into the night in summer.   Why weren’t my colleagues coming out of their homes on their usual evening walks, I wondered. Even those who dared to come out d...

Short Story On the day Srijan joined the residential school, a 14-year old boy was arrested from his neighbourhood for raping a 6-year old girl.  Srijan’s parents decided to put him in a residential school when he reached class 9 so that he could devote his entire time to studying and thus prepare himself for the medical course that would in due course of time enable him to fulfil his ambition to become a cardiologist.  In a world where people were becoming increasingly heartless cardiologists would be in great demand, his parents thought. Srijan was not so clear about his life’s purpose and its relationship with the world’s hearts.  But he knew clearly that his parents wouldn’t do anything without clear purposes.  So he accepted New India Public School with his whole heart. A few days in the school made Srijan wonder whether his parents had made a mistake.  He was sitting on one of the steps leading down to the playgrounds pondering about what som...