Tomichan Matheikal's blog

A church is a very serious place and it is quite impossible for any Christian to imagine a Catholic priest laughing inside it particularly while praying to his Lord who looks helpless on the Cross. But there is at least one such priest whom I encountered when I was an adolescent. He is Don Camillo, the protagonist of a series of stories in Italian by Giovanni Guareschi. The Communist Mayor of the town, Peppone, plays an equally important role in the stories. Both these characters together make us laugh, think, reflect on life and its multifarious dimensions like ideology, faith, and personal rivalry. I would like to present these two characters here on the occasion of World Laughter Day [May 4] which my blogger-friends Manali and Sukaina have decided to celebrate with a blog-hop. Ladies and gentlemen, allow a devout Catholic priest and a Communist-atheist Mayor to jostle your funny bone on this occasion. D on Camillo is a simple ordinary man in a priest’s cassock. He has his ego...

“Give us our daily bread...” is a prayer I used to recite a number of times every day until I gave up religion in the mid-1980s.  It was when I gave up reciting the prayer that it became meaningful for me in any way.  Until then I just had to go the dining room at the stroke of the bell and my daily bread would be waiting having taken various avatars like idli or cooked rice or the pan-Indian chapatti with their necessary and delicious accompaniments.  When I took up my first teaching job in Shillong where I stayed all alone in a rented house made of tin and wood, the only cooking I knew was to boil things like rice, vegetables and eggs.  I survived pretty well on the fat-free diet and slimmed down rapidly without spending a single paisa in any calorie-burning centre or on any treadmill.  The daily bread for breakfast came from the nearest baker who eventually advised me to cut down on bread and extend the boiled diet to breakfast too.  “A little bit of...

Plagiarised from Arthur Bloch’s book,   Murphy’s Law Murphy’s Law : If anything can go wrong, it will.             Corollary:       1. Every solution breeds new problems.                 2. It is impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious.                 3. Nature always sides with the hidden flaw.                 4. Mother Nature is a bitch. The Murphy Philosophy : Smile... tomorrow will be worse. Boling’s Postulate : If you are feeling good, don’t worry.  You’ll get over it. * If things appear to be going right, you have overlooked something. * Always keep a record – it indicates you’ve been working. * When in ...

Anurag Kashyap’s play, When God Said Cheers , was staged in Delhi recently.  Reading about it in the Metro supplement of today’s Hindu newspaper [14 Feb], I wondered why God couldn’t actually be a person with some sense of humour. All the gods I know are dreadful bores.  They are too grumpy, or jealous, or bloodthirsty.  I’d love a God who would share a drink with me in the evening and engage me in a light-hearted conversation peppered with occasional bouts of laughter.  I’m sure God will burst into laughter when we discuss his priests and their religions.  I can imagine the tears that God will try to hide behind the whisky glass when we will discuss His believers killing other people in His name. And God will tell me a parable: In one of Hitler’s concentration camps, a group of Jews put Yahweh on trial.  They charged him with cruelty and betrayal.  There was nothing that could be offered as a defence for Yahweh.  No extenuatin...