Tomichan Matheikal's blog

One of the easiest things we can do is to masquerade hatred as love.   Most of the present day patriots (or nationalists, as they consider themselves) are motivated by hatred though they think that it is love of their nation that guides them.   It is the hatred of a particular section of people that really motivates these patriots. Hence the violence that underlies the patriotism. If you genuinely love your country, you will find ways of promoting its welfare.   Love is not destructive.   Love does not kill.   Cruelty is cruelty even if you bring in gods and scriptures to justify it.   In the olden days religious people sacrificed animals to appease gods.   That was cruelty to animals though not perceived as such by worshippers.   Today’s religious people sacrifice human beings belonging to other creeds in order to appease gods.   Whether gods are appeased or not, one can eliminate enemies with the contentment of a devout worshipper when religion is invoked to sanction cr

Book Review The Cellist of Sarajevo Author: Steven Galloway Publisher: Atlantic Books, London, 2008 Pages: 227 War is madness.  It takes human civilisation back to savagery.  It dehumanises people and makes of them cowards that hide themselves in holes like rats or ravenous beasts that ferret out the quivering rats from their holes.  It strips people of their dignity as human beings.  Food and water become scarce commodities.  Famine and diseases replace the zest for living.  Friends become foes.  Hatred spreads like a plague. Steven Galloway’s novel, The Cellist of Sarajevo , explores the theme of war through the eyes of four persons: Dragan, Kenan, Arrow and a cellist who is taken from the history of the civil war that rocked Sarajevo in the first half of the 1990s.  The disintegration of the former USSR in 1991 led to a brutal civil war that caused almost a quarter of a million deaths, the worst violence in Europe since World War II.     “At four o’clock