Tomichan Matheikal's blog

When my problems bogged me down, I approached Guru. “No one, not even God, can solve your problems unless you want to solve them yourself,” said Guru. “But…” I was shocked.  I went to him for help because I wanted to solve my problems, didn’t I?  Why is he speaking as if I didn’t want to solve my problems? “ Most people are in love with their problems ,” Guru said as if he had read my mind.  “The drug addict, for example, loves drugs and don’t want to leave them though he may say he wants to kick the habit.  What withholds him from kicking the addiction is precisely what led him to the addiction.” “A sense of emptiness?”  I asked because I had faced that sense time and again.  “Is there anything better than emptiness in life?” asked Guru.  “Weren’t all the Mahatmas searching for emptiness?” “People can’t bear emptiness,” I blurted out. “Precisely.  That’s why they fill their life with things.  And when things fail to satisfy the real inner need, they

Book Review “I’ve done some things I shouldn’t have, I want to put them right....” “Hard to put things right.  You don’t often get that chance.  Sometimes all you can do is not get caught.” [Page 550, The Goldfinch , Donna Tartt, London: Little, Brown, 2013] Dona Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Goldfinch , is a tour de force that explores the theme of growing up in a world which is an inextricable mix of good and evil, beauty and filth.  Theo Decker, the protagonist and first person narrator of the novel, is thirteen years old when he loses his mother to a bomb explosion in the Metropolitan museum in New York.  Their father, an alcoholic gambler, had already abandoned them.  Theo’s world turns upside down after his mother’s death.  All the love and security he needed as a young adolescent is stolen by the tragedy.  He is taken care of by the Barbours until his father comes to claim him learning that much money had been put aside by Mrs Decker for Theo’s educa

Fiction Her face made my heart skip a beat.  Was it really her?  I had not met Maya for over thirty years.  But the perfect symmetry of her thin but mysteriously seductive lips could not have escaped me.  I was walking up towards the Hanuman Temple on the Jakhoo Hill in Shimla when the perfect symmetry on a wrinkled face beneath a silver shock of fluttering hair hit my heart like a perverse Kamadeva’s arrow.   She was wearing a saffron robe.  A rosary of fairly huge rudraksh beads lay on her breast.  The fire in her eyes had not burned out yet though melancholy was threatening to overpower it.  She had entered a narrow trail from the main road.  “Maya,” I called. She halted but did not turn back.  I called the name again.  This time she did turn back to look at the person who had uttered a sound that she did not apparently want to hear.  I walked closer to her.  She stared at me.  I smiled.  “Sam!” She said concealing her surprise with practised expertise.  “Why

When I was a young man I had the opportunity to listen to a great speech by a yogi who demonstrated the merits of yoga.  “We can live a healthy life for a hundred years if we practice yoga ascetically,” he concluded as the audience burst into a thunderous applause.  Later one of the invited guests present on the stage asked the yogi, “Do you ever enjoy some of the simple pleasures of life like eating some food which is forbidden by your creed, sipping a whiskey with sparkling soda and some ice cubes, lying on a beach watching without feeling guilty beautiful girls walk by wearing bikini...?” “No,” admitted the yogi. “What’s the point of living a hundred years then?” asked the man.  And the yogi’s answer was a silent stare. Recently I visited a religious centre in Punjab.  The cult has over 5000 acres of land on which an entire township is built up.  But nobody can use even the mobile phone in that township.  There’s a whole list of Do’s and Don’ts, unbreakable comma

Book Review Author: Eleanor Catton Publisher: Granta, London, 2013 Pages: 832       Price in India: Rs799 There are some books which extract a sigh of relief from us as we turn their last page.  The winner of the 2013 Booker Prize belongs to that category.  You feel relieved that it has come to an end at last.  You feel like a child who has successfully put together all the pieces of a complex jigsaw puzzle after a gruelling struggle. 14 Jan 1866.  Crosbie Wells is found dead in his cottage.  Anna Wetherell is found almost dead elsewhere.  Emery Staines has vanished.  Francis Carver has sailed away in a barque that he bought from Alistair Lauderback presenting himself as Crosbie Wells.  An amount of 4000 pounds (a huge sum in those days) is missing.  Alistair Lauderback has a connection with the real Crosbie Wells which the former does not want to acknowledge.  832 pages are devoted to unravel the above mysteries which are all related to one another.  Hokitika

In 1928, eminent economist  John Maynard Keynes wrote in an essay that in a century the standard of life in Europe and America would improve so much that people would have a lot of leisure.  By 2028, “our grandchildren,” wrote Keynes, would have to work only about three hours a day. The economist was quite wrong, it seems.  14 years away from his predicted time,  the standard of life improved, no doubt, but work or work-related activity has increased more than ever even in the continents he mentioned.  In our own country too, the standard of life has improved considerably.  But we find that the working hours in offices have increased rather than decreased.  In spite of superior technologies like the computer in place of the typewriter, and rapid communication systems like the email, we find ourselves busier than people of the previous generation.  In fact, people had much more time for relaxation in the olden days.   I remember how people of my parents’ generation used to spend

I celebrated the onset of the summer vacation watching Life of Pi on Star Movies.  I haven’t read the novel and hence don’t know how far the movie is loyal to it.  Experience has taught me that movies generally do much injustice to written texts.  I liked the movie, however. The tiger as well as the other animals on the lifeboat may be an invention of Pi.  Though he tells us another story replacing the animals with human characters, he leaves us with the option of choosing between the two tales, without ever telling us conclusively which the real version is. The film is a kind of fable with a moral.  Religions and gods are as good as stories and myths in man’s attempt to discover meaning in life, shows the movie.  They are all palliatives in times of anguish.  Man liberates himself from his pains by transmuting the pain into a narrative.  Religion does the same thing in a slightly different way.  Perhaps, religion has the added advantage in the form of omnipotent and omn

Off the Betwa river, the skyline of Orchha is marked by the pinnacles of the cenotaphs constructed in memory of the Bundela kings and lords.  The chief hobby of most kings and lords in the olden days was conquest.  The victors and the vanquished fill the pages of our history books in the colour of blood.  Orchha’s cenotaphs have stood for centuries reminding us of the futility of all victories.  All cenotaphs and mausoleums remind us of the ultimate fate of all human beings: “Out of dust, to dust again,” as Bahadur Shah Zafar wrote after being imprisoned by his British conquerors.  But the last Mughal Emperor also wrote the following lines in the same poem. You pressed your lips upon my lips, Your heart upon my beating heart... Life is a love affair.  A series of love affairs, rather.  We love people, things, and whatever else adds delight to our life which would be a dreary enterprise without these love affairs.  Political power and sublime art, religious pie

Fiction Ravinder was a fighter.  But that was once upon a time.  When youth boils in the blood like a witches’ brew, it’s easy to be a fighter.  Time, however, puts out the fire beneath the brew eventually.  Experience, rather than time.  You keep fighting with monsters for years, monsters some of whom are real, some illusions and some others are like Quixote’s windmills.  Real monsters have varying motives.  Some want to capture positions of power, some want to swindle money out of the system, and some others want to appear great by belittling others.  Motives abound in the world of monsters.  Monsters are the most motivated creatures, mused Ravinder. And you keep fighting them all through life.  Fight for your dignity, for your principles, or sometimes even for your survival.  And then comes a time when you give up fighting.  You get used to the arrows.  Your skin becomes thick enough to be a shield. Why can’t the world be a place of cooperation rather than competit

When a society changes in any important respect, dislocation of character takes place, said psychologist Eric Fromm.  For example, when the feudalist system was replaced with the capitalist system many people found themselves like fish out of water until they adapted themselves to the new system.  We live in a time of rapid changes.  Each day comes with a new technology, a new software for the laptop, or a new app to be added to the smart phone.  Our world is not what it was twenty years ago.  Post offices have become redundant.  The video player metamorphosed into CD player which soon became defunct.  The CD/DVD drive replaced the floppy drive, only to be overtaken by the pen drive even before we could absorb all these changes.  Door Darshan became a romantic nostalgia struggling to breathe amid a plethora of channels of all types.  Banks went to ATMs before coming home on our laptop screens.  Queues for paying all kinds of bills vanished when online payment gateways opened

Easter brings to mind the resurrection of Jesus.  But Easter was celebrated even before Jesus.  It was a spring festival.  Many states in India have similar festivals.  Vishu in Kerala and Bihu in Assam are examples.  In Western literary traditions, winter symbolises death and spring is the harbinger of new life.  “April is the cruellest month,” begins T S Eliot’s classical poem, The Waste Land . The Eliotean waste land is a metaphor for the aridity of modern life.  In such a world there is only perpetual winter, winter that keeps us warm.  Our life is no better than death, implies Eliot.  We live death-in-life existence clutching lifeless roots in “this stony rubbish”.  Easter, or resurrection as it has come to mean today, is a celebration of new life.  Spring comes with a new life that stirs up the dull roots that lay beneath the snow in winter, to use the Eliotean metaphor.   The whole Christian concept of the Holy Week which starts a week before Easter Sunday is

Fiction Unexpectedly the clouds burst.  Maybe, it was not so unexpected; I had ignored the gathering clouds.  I have a way of deluding myself that life will treat me well since I am a person with no malice in my heart.  I am kind of a Narcissist, if you like. The clouds burst anyway.  I had no choice but run into the nearest building which looked dilapidated.  Not in ruins really.  It looked like someone had pulled it down intentionally before its time had run out.  Not a terrorist attack; not so random.  It looked like a planned attack.  Destruction part by part.  Slow ruin.  Painful ruin. These thoughts were running in my mind when I noticed someone sitting at one of the many doorstops that led to endless emptiness in that ruined building.  He looked like a lunatic.  He had a stubble, unkempt hair which was dripping with rain water, and a burnt-out beedi stub between his fingers.  He sucked at the beedi stub occasionally though it was drenched with water. He gri