Tomichan Matheikal's blog

  Job Job is one of the classical characters in the Old Testament of the Bible who is used by various preachers of Christianity to illustrate the ideals of patience, suffering and submission of the individual will to God’s will.  Job was a “perfect and upright man” and hence was a favourite of God.  He lived a rich and contented life with his good wife, seven sons, three daughters, countless servants, lot of land and herds of cattle.  The devil challenged God saying that if Job’s prosperity was taken away then he would lose his trust in God as well as his virtues.  God gives a free hand to the devil who goes on to wreck Job’s life totally.  Job’s cattle are stolen, servants have their throats slit by enemies, sheep are burnt to death, and his children are killed when a fierce storm knocks down his house.  When none of these tragedies succeeds in eroding Job’s trust in God, the devil inflicts a severe skin disease on him.  When Job scratches his worm-ridden body with a pie

Philosopher Gabriel Marcel drew an interesting distinction between problem and mystery.  Problems have solutions, he said, while mysteries are to be enjoyed unsolved.  “Life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived” is an aphorism attributed to Marcel.  Too many things lie beyond our capacity for solutions.  The earthquakes and the cyclones belong to the nonhuman side of the universe, beyond human control.  When the variegated colours and sounds of nature enchant us we are immersing ourselves in the mystery of the same nonhuman universe.  The universe does not comprehend the difference between the shifting of the tectonic plates and the warbling of the nightingale, between a shipwreck and a swan’s neck.  The heavens are indifferent whether lightning strikes down the greatest monument or Beethoven composes the sweetest symphony.  The sense of wonder or despair belongs to the human consciousness.  The heavens are above and beyond the need for wonder as well

Book Review This Booker winner of 2011 is a short novel that takes you to peaks of insights and intellectual probes into life.  But the plot nosedives to the standards of mediocre thrillers with the suspense revealed at the end.  The author is a brilliant writer and hence the reader is not left disappointed in spite of that apparent flaw.  What is life?  This is the most fundamental question raised by the novel.  Can it be understood and explained by logic and reason?  Can people live together without causing “damage” to one another?  How do we react to the ineluctable damage?  Is life mostly about the damages and our responses to them?  “Some admit the damage, and try to mitigate it; some spend their lives trying to help others who are damaged; and then there are those whose main concern is to avoid further damage to themselves, at whatever cost. And those are the ones who are ruthless, and the ones to be careful of.” (44) * Adrian and Anthony are two of the four

Book Review Only extraordinary writers can write a gripping novel without a neat plot.  Akhil Sharma’s slim novel (228 pages in the hardbound edition that I got – it would be just half of that if formatted a la the old Penguin pocket edition) tells the story of the Mishra family in America.  Everything is going fine for this newly migrated family when tragedy strikes in the form of an accident that the elder son, Birju, meets with.  The accident renders Birju practically lifeless: severely brain-damaged.  The novel shows how this tragedy affects the other three family members.  The story is told by the younger son, Ajay, who is eight years old at the beginning of the novel.  Ajay grows up seeing his father becoming an alcoholic and mother struggling to cope with the hardships.  Ajay has a grudge somewhere within him about mother’s fondness for the comatose Birju.  What makes the novel marvellous is the way the novelist expresses the feelings, emotions and attitudes of his

The ability to view each day as our favourite day would be one of the best possessions we can have.  Looking at the crack of day with renewed zest as well as gratitude, breathing in the smell of freshly mowed grass on the campus, and watching the new buds on the roses are a few of the blessings I begin my days with.  There are many gifts that life brings every day helping me surmount the cynicism tickled up by various reports in the newspapers and the television channels.  Life is magnanimous enough to bring occasional, unusual surprises too.  A meeting I happened to attend just a fortnight back was one such experience.  I wrote a blog about it to celebrate the joy it added to my life.  The city of Delhi which invariably comes across in the news reports as a place of ruthless selfishness and heartless rat race revealed a new face to me that day.  I witnessed the city’s altruism, the readiness to render help to the needy and the oppressed irrespective of religious or ideologica

The spiders and the roaches beat a retreat As November moves on to gnarled mists. They are not like the human beings And cannot put on layers to suit the season. Man is the crown of God’s creation ‘cause he can add on layers and beat the season. His smile can shine through the mist With a dagger tucked away behind the mask. Masks and layers make life’s winter warm And conceal the colour deep down While we fumble through the mist Searching for the very same colour.

The burnt-out parts of crackers and fireworks Lay scattered in the yard and road and wherever the eye could reach. The festival is over. The intoxication lingered a while. And that died out too. Naturally. Leaving an aftertaste somewhere in the hollows within, Sweet and bitter, bitterness competing with sweetness. The sound and fury of the fireworks on the ground and in the heaven Repeated the same old tales, wise or idiotic – who knows?  Who cares? Dazzling lights strutted and fretted Their hour upon the stage Leaving distorted and gaping fragments behind. The fragments will be swept into the dustbins of Swachh Bharat Maybe the next time the Great Actor drives us to the broom store Or maybe they will be carried away by the winds of time That blow relentlessly And mercilessly Erasing the markings we make on dust.

Fiction His heart seethed with envy as he returned to his palace from the Pandava capital.  In spite of all that he had done to eliminate his cousins, they had become more successful and powerful than him.  “I can feel your heartbeat,” Uncle Shakuni told Duryodhana as they were returning from Indraprastha having attended the rajasuya ceremony meant to proclaim the sovereignty of Yudhishtira.  The envy that wiggled its way like a worm into Duryodhana’s heart during the ceremony had made him so blind that he could not even distinguish between land and water.  He fell into the lake beside the Pandava Palace.  His cousins laughed at him as he was struggling to swim with all the royal robes on.   Shakuni had helped his insulted and irate nephew come out of the lake without stripping himself of all dignity.  “If the step falters, even the elephant will fall,” Shakuni admonished the merry Pandavas.  The elephant was the royal animal of the Kauravas of Hastinapura, city of the e

Lot and his daughters - a painting Self-righteous fool that Iam!  Lot beat his chest and lamented.  His cries rose to the heavens, “Yahweh!  Forgive me, forgive me.”  Lot’s sin was manifold.  Lust and incest.  He copulated with both of his daughters.  His daughters’ children would not be his grandchildren as it should have been.  How disgraceful!  The mountains off Zoar echoed his laments. Lot had fled Sodom because of its immorality.  The people were like pigs wallowing in filth: they wallowed in sex and sensuality.  Bored of the women, the men of Sodom sought and found their delights in male bodies.  Left to themselves, their women too discovered their own delights: in the bodies of each other.  Bodily pleasures.  Damnation.  Death. The wombs of Sodom cried to the heavens for seeds to germinate.  The heavens heard the cries.  Yahweh opened the gate of the heavens and told Lot to move out. “You have been a temperate man,” said Yahweh to Lot.  “You did not forsa

“At the age of seventeen, working as a delivery boy at Afremow’s drugstore in Chicago was the perfect job, because it made it possible for me to steal enough sleeping pills to commit suicide.” Sidney Sheldon That’s the opening sentence of the autobiography of a man who became a best-selling popular fiction writer apart from making a name for himself in Hollywood, Sidney Sheldon. Born in 1917, Sheldon had to live his adolescence through the Great Depression.  His mother, Natalie, was born in Russia, a country which drove her family out along with many others during a pogrom against Jews.  She was a dreamer, according to Sheldon.  She dreamt of marrying a prince.  But the husband she got was Otto, “a street fighter who had dropped out of school after the sixth grade.” Poverty at home.  Great Depression in the country.  Nothing to cling on to, nothing to look forward to.  The young Sheldon managed to grab enough sleeping pills from his workplace, enough to kill him.  H

Franz Kafka Franz Kafka’s [1883-1924] novel, The Castle , tells the story of a man called K who is on a futile quest.  K arrives as a land surveyor in the village which is under the jurisdiction of the Castle.  But his summoning is caused by a bureaucratic mistake committed in the Castle; a land surveyor is not required in the village now.  K meets Frieda in the inn meant exclusively for the Castle’s bureaucrats though others are allowed to buy food from there.  Frieda becomes K’s fiancée, leaving her job as a barmaid in the inn as well as her enviable position as the mistress of Klamm, the Chief of the Castle.  Nobody in the village can enter the Castle though everybody’s life is controlled by the Castle.  K wants to meet Klamm but never succeeds.  Finally Frieda leaves him and goes back to her former job in the inn and also accepts one of the two assistants of K as her new man. The Castle towers above the village as a symbol of both spiritual and temporal powers.  It

“Anybody who’s ever mattered, anybody who’s ever been happy, anybody who’s given any gift into the world has been a divinely selfish soul, living for his own best interest.  No exceptions.” Einstein didn’t discover the theories and formulas of relativity with the intention of serving humanity.  It was his interest, his passion, to dwell on such matters.  Otherwise he wouldn’t have been Einstein.  His mind was such that it couldn’t be satisfied with anything less than those ethereal concepts. There are hundreds of artists, writers, scientists, who defied well-established and domineering (even ominously threatening) authorities in order to express the truths they had discovered.  Galileo, for example.  Even Salman Rushdie, why not? Most of us are not Einsteins and Galileos.  We are ordinary mortals who would like to do our ordinary jobs to the best of our abilities and earn our living which will help us live happily with our families or engaging in our hobbies or other me

Plagiarised from Arthur Bloch’s book,   Murphy’s Law Murphy’s Law : If anything can go wrong, it will.             Corollary:       1. Every solution breeds new problems.                 2. It is impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious.                 3. Nature always sides with the hidden flaw.                 4. Mother Nature is a bitch. The Murphy Philosophy : Smile... tomorrow will be worse. Boling’s Postulate : If you are feeling good, don’t worry.  You’ll get over it. * If things appear to be going right, you have overlooked something. * Always keep a record – it indicates you’ve been working. * When in doubt, assert louder. Finagle’s Rule 6 : Do not believe in miracles – rely on them. * Capitalism:            You can win.    Socialism:            You can break even.    Mysticism:            You can quit the game. First Law of Bridge : It’s always the partner’s fault. Law of the Perversity of Nature : You can’