Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Ten days are over after the Prime Minister’s overnight reform of demonetisation.  There’s no sign of adequate valid currency reaching the people.  On the contrary, works are held up, workers go without money to buy food, medical treatments are affected, farmers are unable to buy seeds and cultivate their lands, those who have agricultural produce at home cannot sell them because traders don’t have valid money to pay...  How long does the country want this situation to prolong? The Supreme Court has already expressed its apprehensions about possible riots in the country if adequate valid currency is not made available.  The country can’t expect people to die of starvation when they have their hard-earned money lying in the banks. Moreover, do Indians deserve this situation?  80% of Indians live on less than Rs10,000 per month. They don’t have any black money.  But it is they who actually suffer from the current situation.  The innocent are punished.  The really guilty know

The day Donald Trump strutted proudly to the White House, The Guardian concluded an article about Trumpism with the following paragraph: The religious right is in retreat, and the political appeal of free-market fundamentalism is fading. Republican strategists will now turn to Trumpism to replenish the well, enlisting its many supporters and sympathizers as foot soldiers for a new era of rightwing ascendancy. Now that Trump has reached the White House, the era of Trumpism has just begun. Source: Trump As Lord Vishnu? How Hindus In America Are Campaigning For Donald Trump Some sort of right wing balderdash always holds sway over collective imagination whether in America or India.  Religion may be losing its traditional sheen.  But it keeps reincarnating in the form of gau mata or Trumpism or something of the sort. But is religion really “in retreat”?  This is one question that refused to leave me after reading the Guardian article yesterday.  So I researched using

Hindutva India is very proud of its ancient heritage of Vedic wisdom.  At the same time, it is painfully aware of the futility of that wisdom in a world which is led forward at rocket-speed by Western science.  On the one hand, India sees itself as the Jagatguru.  On the other hand, it has a Prime Minister who goes to every country he can and tries to cash in on Western science as well as Western economics.  Modi’s India sees no contradiction in asserting the superiority of India while begging the other countries for all sorts of investments.  India knows that Western science and economic policies are what really matter in today’s world.  But it cannot digest that fact simply because it believes more in its gods, godmen and the scriptures with all their obsolete systems and worldview.  So Hindutva India will keep asserting that our Vedas and other scriptures contained all the science and mathematics much before the ‘cultureless’ Westerners civilised themselves.  We ha

Joseph S Nye, American political scientist, mooted the concept of ‘soft power’ as a means of gaining ascendancy in the world.  Military and economy give a country its hard power.  Soft power is its ability to persuade other countries to want what it wants them to want. Mr Modi is getting the support of many countries against Pakistan using persuasive tactics as well as realpolitik.  He is relying more on soft power and rightly so.  No one but perverted minds would want a war especially between India and Pakistan because such a war is most likely to escalate into a world war. Soft power can be effective only when it rests solidly on the foundation of substantial hard power.  It is also related to culture and ideology.  The Western civilisation spread rapidly across the world because it was firmly established on a secure hard power foundation.  America was a practical El Dorado. Russia’s communism crumpled when its hard power hit the dust.  Soft power becomes impotent wit

Though India’s own Entrepreneur Baba keeps denouncing everything foreign as unhealthy for the holy people of Bharat, Gujarat Gauseva and Gauchar Vikas Board have imported Egypt’s own Cleopatra as the model of beauty for Bharatiya nari .  According to these Gujarat gaurakshaks, 1.      Cleopatra was the most beautiful woman in the world. 2.      Cleopatra used cow’s milk for bathing. 3.      Therefore the Indian women should use cow’s dung and urine for enhancing their beauty. Don’t ask me what the logic is in that syllogism.  Where on earth have you found logic in any religious assertions and scriptural truths?  Take it on faith.  Faith is “belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel,” as defined by the Devil’s own immortal Ambrose Bierce.  Forgive me for borrowing a foreign definition; Indians are yet to acquire that sort of sense of humour – we are still steeped in bovine scatological aesthetics. Cleop

There’s a lot that India can and should learn.  For example, our terrible lack of civic sense.  We think that public spaces are enormous garbage bins, spittoons or even toilets.  People are treated no better than these public spaces.  We have no qualms about stepping on other people’s toes in order to move ahead in our life.  The most terrible vice is what I call the Indian missionary zeal. That is our typical instinct for poking our nose into other people’s affairs and then giving them unwanted and unwarranted counsels.  Like the missionary who is consumed by the divine zeal to save souls, we go around seeking what’s to be corrected in the other person’s behaviour.  I too possessed this obnoxious zeal for some time in my life.  But I was fortunate enough to have too many people around me who possessed it a million times more than I did.  So they kept a tab on me with a religious zeal that would have put the real missionaries to shame.  And there were the real missionarie

Courtesy: The Indian Express Thanks to the media, a Dana Majhi or a Salamani Behera makes a brief appearance in the history of the country.  Who are they?  We will ask that question tomorrow.  We will forget them.  Because they don’t belong in history.  It was merely a freak chance that put them there.  Dana Majhi entered by carrying the dead body of his wife on his shoulders for a distance of over 10 km.  With his teenage daughter walking beside suppressing her grief.  The picture would shake the conscience of anyone who has a conscience.  Salamani Behera was an 80 year-old woman whose dead body was broken at the hip in order to fold it into two so that it could be packed and carried on a bamboo pole.  How much is a human being worth in this country whose Prime Minister is hopping on and off airplanes in order to carry the greatness of his nation far and wide? History always belonged to the rulers and their minions.  Pick up any history book and we will read about ki

Samuel Johnson was wrong.  Far from being scoundrels, we, the Indian patriots, are an exceptionally sensitive lot.  “As sensitive as the toilet seat,” I can hear the antinational prigs snicker.  The fact is that we care for Mother India.  We care for the Gau Mata.  That’s why we don’t tolerate the likes of Ramya, former MP and actress, who dare to say that “Pakistan is not hell.”  Tell me, how can a former Member of Parliament, make such a statement when she ought to know that the cause of all our problems is Pakistan?  Earlier that other actor’s wife said she felt insecure to live in India.  We told her to go to Pakistan along with her Muslim husband.  And now we have slapped a sedition charge on Ramya.  We are patriots, not scoundrels.  Our national sensitivity is offended when anyone says that Pakistan is not hell.  Our national pride is founded on the premise that Pakistan is our hell. For light to shine, there has to be darkness.  Pakistan is our darkness.  India is heaven

From today's Times of India Some villages in Uttar Pradesh have decided to form their own security forces for the protection of their women.  The Bulandshahr gang rapes are still fresh in India’s collective memory.  You can’t even travel on the national highways of the state without the fear of your women being pulled out of your car by bandits and raped.  The situation is not limited to Uttar Pradesh, however.  There is an increasing sense of insecurity all over the country.  Women are not safe in many parts of the country.  Property is not safe.  Even your money in the bank is not safe.  On the one hand, there are thieves and criminals gaining the confidence that they can attack people with impunity because the police forces are inefficient.  The police, the politician and the criminal seem to work together supporting one another.  Just to mention a few examples: last year an Additional Commissioner of Police of Bengaluru was suspended for his ties with a lottery

Civilisation is an attitude.  It is a sophistication of the mind.  Very few people acquire such sophistication.  The vast majority remain as barbarian as the ancient savage was.  There may be one difference, however. While the ancient savages inflicted physical violence on real enemies, today’s savages tend to assault the individual’s self-confidence psychologically projecting the individual as a perceived enemy.  Physical violence has not vanished altogether.  Most terrorist attacks are physical annihilations.  Attacks on the Dalits and Muslims in India by the so-called vigilantes are often both physical and psychological.  Tying up people and lashing their buttocks before a crowd is more a psychological attack than physical. So is urinating on someone’s face or forcing someone to eat cow-dung.      PM Modi has publicly admitted that 4 out of 5 of these vigilantes are criminals taking advantage of the situation.  RSS has taken exception to the PM’s statistics.  It may be

I salute Mr Modi for his latest speeches.   On Saturday, he lambasted the gau rakshaks in no uncertain terms.   He called them anti-socials who are trying to masquerade their maleficence with feigned religiousness.   He has appealed to the state governments to take stern action against such criminals. Today addressing a rally in Hyderabad, he said, “If you want to attack, attack me and not Dalits. If you want to shoot, shoot me and not Dalits.”  Better late than never.  The PM should have spoken out long ago when certain sections of the country’s population or their religious places were attacked right from the time he took over the highest political authority in the country.   The PM should have spoken out when Kalburgi, Dabholkar and Pansare were murdered brutally for supporting the causes of secularism.  Not even the protests from eminent writers of the country who returned their Sahitya Akademi awards provoked the PM into taking the issue seriously.  Rohith Ve

A relatively new trend that is gaining much popularity in the Indian online journalistic media is the posting of vituperative comments anonymously.  Most such comments are overtly communal in nature and support or attack a particular religion.  If these comments are analysed in sufficient detail, we may suspect that there are paid writers who post comments for the sake of defending a particular party and its religious ideology.  Some comments by one 'Ram' in the Indian Express Hitler and his Nazis made use of similar strategies for propaganda.  Some of the most effective strategies used by the present dominant ideology in India which considers certain animals more sacred than human beings are very similar to those employed by the Nazis. For example: Posters and slogans, Anti-Semitism/antinationalism, Use of the mass media for propagating distorted truths, Mythologising the political party and its history, Projection of one individual as the only efficient leader.

Delivering the concluding address at BJP's National Executive yesterday, Mr Modi presented seven mantras to his party workers.  Empathy and self-restraint are two of the seven resounding mantras.  The problem is that they only resounded like some hollow echoes in a wilderness because they were accompanied with Modi's abiding taunting of the Congress.  All those great mantras lost the wind in their wings because of the cognitive dissonance that accompanied the rhetoric. Empathy and taunting don't go hand in hand.  Mere rhetoric has never swayed any heart so far.  That's why Modi's speeches make no ripples in spite of his being an excellent orator. Perhaps, the most pathetic fate that Modi is inflicting upon his party is the compulsive need to flog the Congress even after the latter has become as good as a carcass.  Modi should deliver himself and his party from all forms of hatred which has marked them right from the beginning.  The BJP has to take positive steps

The easiest way to earn fabulous wealth in India today is religion.  There are quite a few godmen and ammas who have amassed more wealth than the Ambanis and Adanis by selling gods to people. What happened in Mathura yesterday should open the eyes of both the people and the authorities.  The followers of one Baba Jai Gurudev illegally occupied 280 acres and used violence when the police tried to evict them.  The ‘religious’ people used swords, knives, guns, grenades and even automatic weapons. Exemplary cooperation between a Baba and his Government The Baba who died in 2012 (at the age of 116 as claimed by his followers) started off his divine career making the fraudulent claim that he was Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose.  That was in 1975 when people were not as willing as they apparently are today to be hoodwinked.  The Baba’s fraud was greeted with a shower of slippers, rotten eggs and tomatoes.  But Babas being some of the most ingenious people, they always find a way

Kerala does not have the tradition of re-electing a government.  So yesterday’s poll results would not have surprised anybody.  Moreover, the UDF government was steeped in corruption charges.  Kerala Results in a nutshell Yet the Pala constituency re-elected K. M. Mani who faced serious allegations related to the bar scam.  The people of Pala are neither ignorant politically nor blind in their allegiance to Mr Mani.  Mani has done much for the people of his constituency.  He has intimate relationships with the Catholic church which is a strong force in Pala.  People benefit one way or another if Mani is in power.  That is the secret of Mani’s success.  It has nothing to do with any ideology. P. C. George who rebelled furiously against Mani’s corruption and became an enemy of both the UDF and the LDF because of his undiplomatic forthrightness and bravado won as an independent candidate from Poonjar, Mani’s neighbouring constituency.  George’s victory indicates that wha

The most sacred duty of our political leaders seems to have become hurling allegations against one another.  Turn to any news channel on the TV at any time and you will hear some politician accusing another one of some crime.  The Prime Minister accuses the Leader of the Opposition of chicanery.  The Chief Minister of Delhi accuses the Prime Minister of possessing fraudulent academic degrees.  In Kerala which is going to the polls next week, every candidate’s speeches are spiced with aspersions cast on the integrity of his opponents.  In addition to all the domestic laundry washing carried out in the public places, the Keralite is condemned to endure much laundry brought from Delhi by all the significant leaders including the Prime Minister. Moulding Kerala in the Modi way A Dalit student was raped and killed brutally (or killed and then raped, as reports have it) recently in Kerala.  The police carried out the mandatory investigation in the most perfunctory manner because