Tomichan Matheikal's blog

The other day a student asked me who my role model was. It’s a dangerous question if it comes from an intelligent person and this student is indeed intelligent. Donkey years ago, when someone hurled this question at me – with a lot of malice – my answer was Mahatma Gandhi. The questioner laughed uproariously. He had reasons to. I was a clownish alcoholic at that time. The questioner was trying to be my well-wisher. Those were days when the entire town of Shillong became my collective well-wisher. One of the best things that people love is to see you as a patient etherized upon their counselling chair. Almost everyone I know in my life is a counsellor. They tell you what to do and what not to. They tell you what a catastrophe you are and how you can be much better with their help. They have all the answers to the rigmarole that you are to yourself. I was not really joking when I foisted Mahatma Gandhi upon that well-wisher as my role model though I was an alcoholic and I ate all ki

Professor V Karthikeyan Nair’s article in the latest issue of the Malayalam weekly Kalakaumudi [June 4-11] is titled ‘The Sengol that tore apart the Constitution’. The article starts with making contrast between India and a few religious nations. Pakistan is a Muslim nation. The UK is a Christian nation. But India towers above them all with a very modern Constitution which states explicitly that Indians can have religions but India does not have a religion and that Indians can have gods but India does not have gods. It is that very fundamental principle that the government of India mocked albeit very solemnly when the Prime Minister received the Sengol (sceptre) as a symbol of power from a Brahmin religious supremo. It is a serious matter that the Prime Minister himself affronted the Constitution. In the days of kings and chieftains, crowns and sceptres were symbols of supreme authority. India liberated herself from kings and chieftains in Aug 1947 when the first Prime Minister ma

Narendra Modi made nationalism India’s national pastime. The kind of nationalism that he advocates is a very narrow-minded view which amounts to his personal conviction that India is the greatest country because he was born in it. Hand in hand with that narcissism walks xenophobia. Modi’s xenophobia is not so much fear as hatred of the others. He has succeeded in raising hatred to the stature of a virtue. In 2019, Time reported that 90% of the hate crimes in the past decade happened during Modi’s reign as PM. Today, three years later, that figure will be higher, no doubt. 99% of hate crimes in the last decade in India must have happened with Modi’s tacit support. In 2016, an online dictionary cited xenophobia as the word of the year. The ascent of Trump with his kind of xenophobia is what prompted the dictionary to highlight that word. Trump hated a whole lot of people. He got along very well with Modi, however. Similar souls who had many things to hate and few to love. Xenopho