Tomichan Matheikal's blog

From India Today Name-changing is one of the hobbies of India’s present Prime Minister. I wrote about it a few days back too though rather facetiously: see India, Bharat, Hindustan . The latest issue of India Today has devoted page after page to the PM’s present rechristening. I wish to bring here a few interesting observations from some of those eminent writers in the weekly. 1. Shashi Tharoor Tharoor argues that “In English, and therefore internationally, our country was referred to as ‘India’; in Hindi and other Indian languages, ‘Bharat’ was our country’s name.” For example: We, the people of India / Bharat ke log . Or The President of India / Bharat ke Rashtrapati . Tharoor gives us an interesting parallel from Germany. “’Germany’ is Deutschland at home and to all who speak Deutsch (the language we refer to as ‘German’).” Tharoor dismantles the argument that India is a name given by the British colonialists. The “name India has nothing to do with British colonialism: it p

One of the infinite trolls on the various media in India says, “When a clown enters the palace, he does not become a king; the country becomes a circus.” Has India become one such enormous circus? Today’s Malayala Manorama [15 Sep] newspaper says that the 400 nurses recruited by one single agency in Kochi at one time alone are struggling to eke out their living by mowing lawns and doing other jobs such as painting walls. They spent over Rs12 lakh to get to their El Dorado in the hope that all their financial problems including those of their families would be over soon when they start earning handsome pay-packets as nurses in good hospitals. Millions of young jobseekers are leaving India every year. “India saw a 30% decrease in jobs for young people since 2016,” say news headlines . It is not only jobseekers that leave the country but also young students who complete class 12. From the school where I am teaching, half of the students go abroad for higher studies after class 12 b

From The Print India is going to be a superpower. When my Prime Minister says that I should feel proud. My veins should bulge with the thrust of rushing blood of patriotism. I wonder why my blood doesn’t rush. Am I not patriotic? Am I an antinational Modi-baiter who should be put behind the bars like hundreds of others ? A whole state called Manipur is burning in the imminent superpower. People are killing one another. The Prime Minister hasn’t said a word about it though the violence has been going on for nearly three months. When a video surfaced showing the brutal treatment that the PM’s supporters extended patriotically to two women in Manipur, Modiji condescended to say that such treatment of women was very un-Hindustani. And that was an utter lie. Hindustani culture burnt women on their husbands’ funeral pyres. And Modiji is a diehard fan of that great ancient Indian culture . The great Indian culture has always stifled the vast majority of people in various guises like th

From India Today Knights in Shining Armour Narendra Modi visited the Northeast of his kingdom more than 60 times after he crowned himself as the emperor of India-to-be-renamed-as-Hindustan. Travel is one of his countless passions and hence the number 60 need not bother us. The only place left on the earth for him to visit is Timbuctoo. It is rumoured that he wanted to go to the moon on the latest edition of Chandrayan but the scientists were not quite sure of whether their thing would land in Pakistan mistaking it for the moon. The scientists who made that rocket went to the Tirupati temple to ask Venkateswara (Modi may not know that Hindu God yet!) to direct the rocket scientifically to the moon instead of Pakistan. At that time Modi was in France preaching peace to the world. Om shanti. Let there be peace, said Modi to France. And Manipur burnt. Manipur has to burn for the sake of world peace. Narendra Modi is the name of the last incarnation of God, according to the latest Hind

The height of xenophobia - remember this face? Last month, Scotland elected 37-year-old Humza Haroon Yousaf of Pakistani origin as the head of their government. A few months before that, the United Kingdom elected Rishi Sunak as their Prime Minister. Sunak’s parents are Indians – Punjabis, to be precise. Kamala Harris, vice president of the USA, has Indian roots too. Can someone like that – a person of Italian origin, say – become India’s Prime Minister? Is it hypocrisy or xenophobia that prevents India from being more open towards diverse cultures and races? Both, I guess. Our hypocrisy is phenomenal. We pretend to be everything that we are not. The leader will be preaching tolerance and love for all people while his followers are attacking places of worship belonging to other religions. The same leader will be preaching about morality in politics while his mentor is engaged in buying MLAs and MPs belonging to other parties. This post is not about our hypocrisy, I remember.

The title of George Orwell’s celebrated novel could have been 2024 and its setting India. Winston Smith is a low-ranking member of the ruling party. Like anyone else in the country, he is also under the constant surveillance of Big Brother, the omniscient ruler of the country. Big Brother’s Party controls everything including the people’s history and language and even their thoughts. Certain words are banned from Newspeak, the official language. Even nurturing rebellious thoughts is criminal and ‘thought-crime’ is the worst. Winston works in the Ministry of Truth which is rewriting the history of the country. Even love is a crime and so Winston has to keep his love for Julia secret. Winston is trapped eventually by the spying police and is subjected to severe brainwashing. Finally he begins to love Big Brother and to have no feelings whatever for Julia whom he has betrayed. My summary doesn’t do justice to Orwell’s great work. Frankly, I had never considered 1984 a great work u

T-Rex Tastes the Rainbow  is a painting by Olga Shvartsur In the Jurassic world of the movies, man-made monsters go out of the control of their creators and become lethal to the creators themselves or their fellow human beings. Something similar is happening in today’s India. Certain skeletons of a bygone civilization are disinterred by some self-proclaimed nationalists. The skeletons slowly acquire life. Then they move out of the control of their excavators and behave like the dinosaurs in the Jurassic World movies. One of the most lethal actions of these dinosaurs is on the school curriculum. A lot of history is being deleted. New history is created gradually. The Mughals who ruled most of India, including Pakistan and Afghanistan, for three whole centuries, were swallowed by the dinosaurs some time back. Now the freedom fighters are chomped on. Not even Mahatma Gandhi is spared. His killer is all set to be hoisted on a pedestal. Even chapters like ‘US hegemony in world politics’

Yesterdays pretend to be sweet. One of the most popular poets of Kerala, ONV Kurup, composed an unforgettable song about the poet persona’s longing to return to the days of his childhood and wander once again in the courtyard where his memories roam, shake the fruit trees, draw water from the well and taste its pristine sweetness… The past is supposed to be pristine and hence sweet. I have a huge collection of old Malayalam film songs in the pen drive that plays while I drive. Many people who have travelled with me have wondered whether I’m in love with the past. I am not. My past had nothing to make me feel nostalgic about it, let alone romantic. My childhood was a pain and youth was worse. There is nothing sweet or pristine about any of it. Absolutely nothing. My childhood reminds me of the canes wielded by my parents and teachers with Gradgrindian cold brutality. Those canes were replaced by repressive social games played by certain missionaries in my youth. So why do the Mal

Narendra Modi made nationalism India’s national pastime. The kind of nationalism that he advocates is a very narrow-minded view which amounts to his personal conviction that India is the greatest country because he was born in it. Hand in hand with that narcissism walks xenophobia. Modi’s xenophobia is not so much fear as hatred of the others. He has succeeded in raising hatred to the stature of a virtue. In 2019, Time reported that 90% of the hate crimes in the past decade happened during Modi’s reign as PM. Today, three years later, that figure will be higher, no doubt. 99% of hate crimes in the last decade in India must have happened with Modi’s tacit support. In 2016, an online dictionary cited xenophobia as the word of the year. The ascent of Trump with his kind of xenophobia is what prompted the dictionary to highlight that word. Trump hated a whole lot of people. He got along very well with Modi, however. Similar souls who had many things to hate and few to love. Xenopho

Historians are not sure whether Padmavati is a mere legend or a historical figure.  That doesn’t matter either.  Objective truth is not the concern of most people.  People want convenient truths.  People want truths that serve their practical purposes.  Most religious truths belong to that category.  Padmavati is also one such expedient truth.  What is that truth?  I am Rani Padmavati, the Queen of Chittor.  People call me the Queen of Beauty.  I have never understood why our men bother about beauty at all.  They are warriors and love fighting. Bravery, physical strength and honour are the values they really cherish and want all of us to possess.  We cherish beauty too.  But we’d prefer to keep beauty veiled behind the purdah.  If anyone other than the husband dares to raise the purdah, he will be killed.  Beauty is a private property among us.  We, the women, are our men’s private properties. That is how my story of Padmavati began, a story which I wrote when the cont

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is yet to gain any significant political clout in Kerala.   Yet the party is already mired in charges of corruption.   In order to save its image the party has been forced to expel R S Vinod, the party’s cooperative cell convener in the state.   Vinod was accused of having accepted a bribe of no less than ₹5.60 crore from R Shaji, chairman of an educational trust who paid the amount for securing Medical Council of India’s (MCI) clearance for his medical college.   According to reports, the amount was routed through Delhi as a hawala transaction.   The report also mentions M T Ramesh, general secretary of Kerala BJP, as a recipient of bribe from another medical college.   Ramesh has denied his involvement in the scam and the party has chosen to stand behind him since it cannot afford to oust too many leaders.   It is a question of waiting and watching before more names of BJP leaders come up in connection with the scam and possibly other scams