Tomichan Matheikal's blog

One of the controversies that has been raging in Kerala for quite some time now is about a girl student’s decision to wear the hijab to school. The school run by Christian nuns did not appreciate the girl’s choice of religious identity over the school uniform and punished her by making her stand outside the classroom. The matter was taken up immediately by a fundamentalist Muslim organisation (SDPI) which created the usual sound and fury on the campus as well as outside. Kerala is a liberal state in which Hindus (55%), Muslims (27%), and Christians (18%) have been living in fair though superficial harmony even after Modi’s BJP with its cantankerous exclusivism assumed power in Delhi. Maybe, Modi created much insecurity feeling among the Muslims in Kerala too resulting in some reactionary moves like the hijab mentioned above. The school could have handled it diplomatically given the general nature of Muslims which is not quite amenable to sense and sensibility. From the time I shi...

Book Review   Title: Descent Into Paradise Author: Daniel Bosley Publisher: Macmillan, 2023 Pages: 410   Sometime in 2001-2002, when I was new to Delhi’s pretentiousness, I applied for a teaching post in the Maldives. Now I realise that my destiny [which Maggie calls Providence] was good enough that my application was rejected. I would have been a dead man on one of the thousand plus islands and atolls of the country within a year of my arrival there. This is one of the many sad lessons I learn from Daneil Bosley’s book on the island nation. The author arrived in the Maldives as a journalist, unable to find a better job than a postman’s in his own country, the UK. From 2011, Bosley worked in the Maldives for seven years and married a young woman from there too, having converted to Islam just for the wedding. His book comes from firsthand information and impressions about the country’s history, politics, and, above all, religion. And a doom that awaits the cou...

The phone rang just as I finished my breakfast. It was my sister calling from Kerala. “Do you remember that professor who got into a controversy with a question he had set for an exam on Muslims?” asked my sister. “Yes, has something happened to him?” I asked with a sense of foreboding. “He was attacked by a group of people this morning and his palms have been chopped off,” said my sister who lives quite near to the college where the professor teaches. I switched on the TV. A Malayalam news channel reported that about eight persons intercepted the professor’s car as he was returning home from church. They were carrying weapons like knives and axes. They also attacked the women in the car though not fatally. My thoughts raced back to J. S. Bandukwala’s article in the latest edition of Outlook which I read last evening and the interview with Salman Rushdie in this morning’s Literary Review of the Hindu. Both Bandukwala and Rushdie are Muslims who think that there is something ser...