Tomichan Matheikal's blog

No great leader emerges unless there is a crisis.  Mohandas Gandhi would have remained a mediocre lawyer had not the freedom struggle discovered the leadership qualities in him.  Abraham Lincoln would not have secured his present place in history without the crisis that challenged his potential in the form of the Civil War. Mr Narendra Modi has his historical opportunity now to prove his station in history.  India is faced with a crisis called nationalism. Nationalism, by definition, is excessive devotion to the interests of a particular nation-state.  It is valid when there is a threat to the autonomy of the nation-state.  India is not facing any such threat now.  Yet nationalism has become a craze among a sizeable section of the population.   When there is no threat to the nation, the only other reason for nationalist sentiments to breed and spread is a desire to dominate.  It is an urge to impose a certain culture or religion or...

Psychologist Wilhelm Reich argued that our character is a mask or a set of masks.  We constantly encounter various pains in our life, pains caused mostly by other people.  “The other is my hell,” as Sartre put it tongue-in-cheek.  Our parents are our first hells, as little Wilhelm learnt personally.  His father used to beat him frequently.  His mother was a pain because she refused to intervene between little Wilhelm and the father’s cane.  When his mother started an affair with Wilhelm’s tutor, she added another pain to the boy’s psyche.  When the boy took revenge by informing his father about her affair, the boy added another pain to his mind because his father now started employing his cane on both of them until his mother committed suicide. Our leaders have a different sort of Power Point Parents, teachers, the society, priests of the religion – the list of hells that we have to endure is endless (especially in childhood, though pain se...

“Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things,” said Management guru, Peter Drucker.  Many institutions as well as nations have gone down the tunnel of damnation merely due to lack of good leadership, though their management was good.  Doing things right is not a guarantee that one is doing the right things.  When the Jews wanted to stone the adulteress to death, they were doing things right.  When Jesus told them, “Let him who has not sinned cast the first stone,” he was doing the right thing.  [John 8:1-11] The Hindu newspaper today [22 Oct] carries a review of Maya Tudor’s book, The Promise of Power: The Origins of Democracy in India and Autocracy in Pakistan.   Both India and Pakistan had the same origins: a British colony.  Yet India became a democracy that empowered the people and Pakistan became a theocracy which enervated its citizens.   Why did it happen? The answer lies in the differ...

The King said, “Who can get rid of that priest for me?” And Thomas Beckett was killed. Party workers go beyond the wishes of the Leader. I wish I could be a party worker.

“The Ancient Egyptians built the pyramids when Germans were living in caves.  Arabs ruled the world in the Middle Ages – the Muslims were doing algebra when Germans princes could not write their own names…. Civilizations rise and fall…”  One of Ken Follett’s characters says that in The Winter of the World . We may like to think we are more civilised than our forefathers.  One of the many illusions under which quite many people labour is that human civilisation improves with each passing day.  The person speaking through his mobile phone with another who is sitting thousands of miles away is more civilised than the one who communicated sitting in a jungle with the help of the signals beaten on a drum.  Is he really? Historians and scholars like Prof Felipe Fernandez-Armesto will not agree.  The professor says that “Societies do not evolve: they just change” [ Civilizations ].  The change need not be for the better. Consider the follow...