Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Historical Fiction “I’m going to die,” declared Diogenes.  He was 96.  By the time you reach the age of 96 you will have acquired the wisdom to know when to die.  You can have such wisdom even earlier.  Depends on what life taught you.  Rather what you cared to learn from life. Diogenes was on a street in Corinth.  Dying.  The street was his home.  When the weather was too good outside he chose to get into a barrel.  Somebody had gifted him that barrel.  Why somebody?  Greece was mad enough to understand the madness of Diogenes and appreciate it.  But Greece was not so mad that Diogenes was prompted to declare with the certainty that comes only to godmen that “Most men are within a finger’s breadth of being mad.” “It takes a wise man to discover a wise man,” declared Diogenes with the same godman-certainty when Xeniades of Corinth bought him from the slave dump.  He had been sold as a slave by one o...

Fantasy “Then again, you may pick up just enough education to hate people who say, ‘It’s a secret between he and I.’ Or you may end up in some business office, throwing paper clips at the nearest stenographer.  I just don’t know.  But do you know what I’m driving at, at all?” That’s what a teacher tells a student, the protagonist of J D Salinger’s celebrated novel, The Catcher in the Rye .  Holden, the student, was critical of everything around him.  He was confused by the hypocrisy of the adults around him.  The ability of his companions to adjust to that hypocrisy confounded him further.  In short, life confounded him. Holden ended up in a lunatic asylum.  He couldn’t cope with the confounding life.   But the novel ended when Holden was only 16 years old.  What if Holden continued to live beyond the novel, outside the asylum, liberated from his neurotic obsessions with hypocrisy, and ready to accept the world as it ...