Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Source At the twilight hour they come in swarms.  Hundreds of them emerge from the soil with the vigour and wantonness of children liberated from tedious classrooms and fly.  Towards the nearest source of light.  The light scorches their wings and the wingless bodies looking more like worms than ants fall and die slow deaths on the ground.  Even if the light is gentle enough not to scorch the wings, they will eventually lose the wings, tired of flying round the light, weary of not being able to assimilate the light they are so much in love with, and fall.  Ants emerge from nowhere within seconds and carry away the dead bodies. Alates or flying termites, that’s what they are. I have watched their desperate love affair with the light time and again from the time I settled down in the village a couple of years ago.  They acquire wings only to mate and then die.  They mate in flight. The fertilised females will also lose their wings and go on to establish new colonies of ants w

Darkness is a pervasive theme in Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth .  The play opens with three witches one of whom says ominously, “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.” The protagonists are Macbeth and his wife Lady Macbeth both of whom are described as ‘children of darkness’ by the Shakespearean scholar A. C. Bradley.  It is worth quoting Bradley in some detail. “These two characters are fired by one and the same passion of ambition ; and to a considerable extent they are alike.  The disposition of each is high, proud, and commanding .  They are born to rule, if not to reign.  They are peremptory or contemptuous to their inferiors .  They are not children of light, like Brutus and Hamlet; they are of the world.  We observe in them no love of country, and no interest in the welfare of anyone outside their family .  Their habitual thoughts and aims are ... all of station and power.” Ambition in itself is a good thing.  But when ambition is coupled with the characteristics highl

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

Wish you a Happy Diwali. Let your light shine. Do not hide it under any religion ism political party ideology strategy...

Lead, kindly light Amid the encircling gloom... But we have encircled you!

Wish you a HAPPY DIWALI LET YOUR LIGHT SHINE all the way