Tomichan Matheikal's blog

S leep eludes me. It happens these days. I can hear missiles roaring in Lebanon, the Promised Land of erstwhile days, the land whose cedar trees built Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem. It could be from Ukraine that the roars came. The Great Terminator of Ukraine is now threatening to use nuclear bombs to ensure his victory. His victory! One man’s victory is the defeat of millions of people. One man makes a lot of difference. There is this one man who is giving an interview to a religious TV channel. A Christian channel, to be precise. He quotes chapters and verses of the Old Testament to prove that the levelling of Gaza is a divine plan, one which was devised by God Himself centuries ago. “Didn’t Yahweh say through Amos that He would send a fire on the wall of Gaza, Amos 1:7?” The devout Christian says with ardent faith in his holy book. “What does Zephania 2:4 say? For Gaza shall be forsaken, and Ashkelon a desolation. They shall drive out Ashdod at the noon and Ekron shall be root...

  Book Review Title: Days at the Morisaki Bookshop Author: Satoshi Yagisawa Translator: Eric Ozawa Publisher: Manila Press, 2023 Pages: 150 Love is both simple and complex at the same time. As an experience, it is simple. But certain factors such as the relationships it brings and the motives behind the relationships make it quite complex. Japanese writer Satoshi Yagisawa’s debut novel about a second-hand bookshop in Jimbocho, Tokyo, and some people associated with it, is as simple and complex as love itself. Reading this short novel is like bathing in a cool, crystal-clear stream. It refreshes you more and more as you immerse yourself in it. I finished reading it in one go yesterday; it enchanted me. The protagonist is 25-year-old Takako whose boyfriend ditches her. She was too naïve to understand that the young man was only taking advantage of her while he was really in love with another woman. “This guy is rotten to the core,” Uncle Satoru tells Takako about t...

“As I grow older, I discard one after another of my masks; but when, having discarded the last, the world sees my unknown features, I doubt whether a single cry of terror will be raised!” This is what Jerome tells his wife Gabrielle in Francois Mauriac’s short story, A Man of Letters . The story is a profound exploration of human love and relationships, particularly conjugal love. Husband-wife relationship demands a lot more understanding and compromises than any other relationship. Living together for years will result in knowing each other too well, warts and all. Can you accept all that you see in your partner? How much compromise are you willing to make? Or, can you rise to the level of God? The narrator of Mauriac’s story says that “It is God’s omniscience that helps Him to endure the sorrows of the world.” If we know everything about a person, we cannot but love him/her. But knowing any person that well is not quite possible. People wear masks to conceal their ugly aspects,...

The last snap I took of Brownie That Brownie went away without giving me a hint is what makes her absence so painful. It’s nearly a month and I know now for certain that she won’t return. Worse, I know that she didn’t want to leave me. She couldn’t have. Brownie is the only creature who could make me do what she wanted. She had the liberty to walk into my bedroom at any time of the night and wake me up for a bite of her favourite food. She would sit below the bed and meow. If I didn’t get up and follow her, she would climb on the bed and meow to my face. She knew I would get up and follow her to the cupboard where bags of cat food were stored.  My Mistress in my study Brownie was not my only cat; there were three others. But none of the other three ever made the kind of demands that Brownie made. If any of them came to eat the food I served Brownie at odd hours of the night, Brownie would flatly refuse to eat with them in spite of the fact that it was she who had brought me out...

India’s ruling party, Narendra Modi’s own party, wants Indians to celebrate Valentine’s Day as Cow Hugging Day . Valentine is a Western concept, they inform us. India has a superior sexual morality. Like what you see in the classical temples of Khajuraho in Madhya Pradesh, the Sun Temples of Odisha and Gujarat, Virupaksa of Hampi in Karnataka, the Jain temples of Rajasthan, the Sathyamurthy Perumal Temple of Tamil Nadu, and the Lingaraj Temple of Odisha. If I post pictures of the sculptures from those temples, Google may block my post as obscene because Google is Western and India is the West’s Guru now. But let me try anyway to put a representative pic or two here, just to give you an idea of what ancient Indian civilisation was offering to its temple devotees.  Just Google for Indian temple erotica for a lot, lot more India is a country that gave Kamasutra to the world. Kamasutra is not just a sex manual though any average man and some women too will love it as that. It descr...

Book Review Title: The Travelling Cat Chronicles Author: Hiro Arikawa Translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel Publisher: Penguin Random House, 2019 Pages: 249 This book will touch the most tender core of your heart. It is a love story with a difference: it is love between a man and his cat. Right from page one to the last page, this novel gives the reader a feeling of tenderness. Reading this novel is like sitting on the side of a beautiful mountain brook and listening to the gurgling of water while feeling the gossamer caress of the cool breeze on your body. I bought this book precisely because I have four pet cats who all have a special place each in my heart. If you love cats, this book will keep you hooked. Even if you don’t have a soft corner for those creatures, you will still love this book for the tenderness it makes you feel. The author, Hiro Arikawa, is a cat-lover, obviously.  Hiro Arikawa with her cat Satoru Miyawaki is a young man who takes care ...

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so...

Florentino Ariza has had 622 serious relationships (combo pack with sex) apart from numerous fleeting liaisons before he is able to embrace the only woman whom he loved with all his heart and soul. And that embrace happens “after a long and troubled love affair” that lasted 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days. Florentino is in his late 70s when he is able to behold, and hold as well, the very body of his beloved Fermina, who is just a few years younger than him. She now stands before him with her wrinkled shoulders, sagged breasts, and flabby skin that is as pale and cold as a frog’s. It is the culmination of a long, very long, wait as far as Florentino is concerned, the end of his passionate quest for his holy grail. “I’ve remained a virgin for you,” he says. All those 622 and more women whose details filled the 25 diaries that he kept writing with meticulous devotion have now vanished into thin air. They mean nothing now that he has reached where he longed to reach all his life. The...

Bob on my sofa Cleanliness belongs to air-conditioned rooms. Heaven must be air-conditioned since cleanliness is next to godliness. I keep my windows open so that my cats can come in and go out as they like. They do make the walls and windowsills dirty. Maggie and I clean the places regularly as well as we can. My cats make the sofa covers dirty. It’s my duty to wash the covers regularly while Maggie cooks food for me and our cats. We are happy, cats and us. Our relatives have problems, however. How can we keep the house clean with all these cats around? Our hearts are clean, friends. We keep our house clean too. But if you notice a cat’s pawprint somewhere on the floor tiles or smell a kitten on the sofa covers, please understand that love has its limitations like tolerance. I have seen children’s toys leaving footprints all over. Love leaves stains like paw prints. Where there is love, there will inevitably be some footprints. Air-conditioned rooms are clean. They have ...

Russian Dostoevsky and French Jean-Paul Sartre are both great writers. The latter is more of a philosopher than a novelist, I’d say. Both have left indelible marks in the world of literature. But both have diametrically opposite attitudes towards human society. Sartre apparently hated people (except beautiful women). Hell is other people, he said. Dostoevsky, on the other hand, upheld love as the greatest virtue. Hell, for Dostoevsky, is the suffering caused by a person’s inability to love.  Jean-Paul Sartre Sartre thought of love as conflict. People in love try to control each other, he said. Lovers get trapped in vicious circles of sadomasochistic power games which are meant primarily for keeping the other from leaving you. Love is vulnerable precisely because the other person is free to leave you. Love cannot be forcibly extracted from anyone. But many people do just that: extract it. That’s why love becomes power games. Dostoevsky would look upon Sartre with commiseration. ...

Romeo and Juliet [ PNGwing ] In Shakespeare’s notable romantic tragedy, Juliet hurls the question: “Wherefore art thou Romeo?” The meaning is ‘Why are you Romeo?’ Those who are familiar with the play will understand what Juliet meant. If Romeo’s name was different, their love would have met with no resistance. Romeo was the son and heir of the Montague family while Juliet was a Capulet. There is a violent feud going on between the two families and hence the love between Romeo and Juliet is not welcome. Juliet’s question, in fact, is: ‘Why are you a Montague?’ ‘What’s in a name?’ A few moments later in the play, Juliet who has not turned 14 yet, will ask. That little girl who is yet to understand that there is much to a name will end up stabbing herself in the heart for the sake of love. Wherefore art thou, Juliet? I am left thinking. I turned 63 the other day. [Hitler and I share the same birthday!] Half a century older than Juliet, I ask myself: Wherefore art thou, Tomichan? ...

Quintin Matsys, from Wikipedia There was a young man in Antwerp. And there was a young girl too. We don’t need anything more to begin a romantic story. And that’s just what happened. The man and the girl fell in love with each other. Passionately. The normal course would have been marriage and family life. But that didn’t happen. Because the man was a blacksmith and farrier by profession and the girl was the daughter of a painter. ‘I don’t want my daughter to marry a blacksmith,’ the master painter asserted. It was in the 15 th century. Feminism was not even a thought-experiment. And the boys didn’t have all the fun. Love has a unique power – the century doesn’t matter. Quintin Matsys was determined to win over the master painter and then his daughter. He sneaked into the master’s studio one day and painted a small fly on the master’s current frame. When the master returned to the studio, he tried to swat the fly only to discover that it was a painted one. The master was quick t...