Tomichan Matheikal's blog

  Dostoevsky Dostoevsky was a compulsive gambler. He also consumed alcohol rather liberally. But he remains one of my favourite novelists of all time. Very few writers have produced novels that surpass the greatness of The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment . This raises a fundamental question: Should we keep a writer’s personal life totally aside while assessing the literary merit of their works? Going a little further with Dostoevsky, his personal vices gave him firsthand experience of despair, guilt, and redemption, which shaped the deep psychological and moral explorations in his novels. Raskolnikov and Ivan Karamazov were all parts of Dostoevksy’s complex personality. In other words, if Dostoevsky was an ideal human being, he wasn’t likely to have produced such great novels. It may also be recalled that most of his greatest works were written under extreme pressure from creditors who kept knocking at his door. If he were not the compulsive gambler that he was, t...

One of the fifteen persons facing corruption charges related to coal mining in Jharkhand is a young man who displayed his nationalism and idealism by wearing the Indian national flag on his sleeves.  He took to the Supreme Court his right to display his patriotism by flying the national flag in places he thought appropriate. His patriotism won him a seat in the Parliament too.  Good old humour Superior to New Morality His uncle is a great moralist apart from being an industrialist.  This great uncle recently handed over his school in Delhi to a godman because of reasons related to morality.  A few years earlier the biography of this great uncle was written by his daughter in which the uncle was quoted raising charges of immorality on the staff of the school in question.  The uncle is renowned for enforcing morality – his version of it, of course – using methods which are not often moral by conventional standards. The school was eventually shut...

The Hammer of God is a short story by G. K. Chesterton about two brothers, Wilfred and Norman.  While Wilfred is an exceptionally devout priest, Norman is a retired colonel who finds his delight in wine and women.  Wilfred’s attempts to inject some fear of God or the divine morality into his brother’s soul are only met with ridicule from the latter.  Finally the priest kills his brother.  Worse, he tries to put the guilt on Joe, the village idiot. The theme of Chesterton’s story is the potential devilishness of self-righteous morality.   The self-righteously religious people see themselves as superior to the normal people who have certain weaknesses like lust and gluttony.  The self-righteous people prefer to pray alone in some corner or niche of the church or the Satsang, away from the sinners.  They may even ascend some mountain in search of their superior aloofness.  Standing at a height, actual or metaphorical, they begin to see ...

Fiction I happened to be in Kerala when the news of Cherian’s murder reached me.  Cherian was what I would call a friend of mine when I was working as a teacher in Assam.  It took some time for me to realise that he had not considered me a friend, however.  For him I was a kind of entertainment.  He loved to call me to the residential school of which he was the proprietor, director, manager and principal.  He would give me brandy to drink and food to eat.  And even a place to sleep if I wished not to go back home.  I had none waiting for me at home and hence could spend the night anywhere.  I was a gypsy of sorts who considered it the sign of an intellectual to claim a cosmopolitan nomadism for one’s identity.  Cherian thought I was a like a buffoon in a circus troupe: born to entertain, though I perceived myself a very serious thinker, a philosopher, and even an intellectual.  I put the intellectual at a higher level because the i...

“What is middle class morality?  Just an excuse for not giving me anything,” says Alfred Doolittle, a character in Bernard Shaw’s play, Pygmalion [which became the celebrated movie, My Fair Lady .]  Doolittle thinks that the middle class deprives people like him of many things like good food or some pleasures of life.  So Doolittle is an outlier.  An outlier, according to the dictionary, is “a person or thing situated away or detached from the main body or system.” Professor Higgins in the same play is also an outlier.  If Doolittle is below the middle class in hierarchy, Higgins is above it.  Doolittle needs the middle class for his financial needs. He needs the job provided by the middle class even if it means carrying the trash of that class.  He is only happy to receive charities from the middle class organisations.  Higgins does not care for the middle class any more than he would care for people like Doolittle.  In fact, Higgin...

“I’m not sinning.  If Burton were doing what I am, it would be sin.”  Joseph Wayne, the protagonist of John Steinbeck’s novel, To a God Unknown , utters those words.  He is referring to his act of venerating a particular tree as sacred.  He sees the spirit of his dead father in that tree.  His brother, Burton, is a puritanical Christian for whom even the act of sex is a sin if it is indulged in except for the purpose of procreation.  Burton thinks that Joseph is committing the serious, pagan sin of worshipping a tree. Joseph tries to explain away his love for the tree as a mere “game.”  But his wife, Elizabeth, understands that it is much more than a game for him.  However, she won’t condemn him as a pagan.  She knows that her husband is a rare human being who has some peculiar qualities and proclivities. Rama, her eldest sister-in-law, had already told Elizabeth that individuals like Joseph were “born outside humanity.”  S...

“Civilization is skin-thin: scratch it and savagery bleeds out.”  [Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Civilizations ] Nobel laureate William Golding’s first novel, Lord of the Flies (1954), tells the story of a group of school boys plane-wrecked on an uninhabited island.  The leadership of the democratic and sensitive Ralph is soon usurped by the savage Jack, and childhood innocence soon gives way to uncanny cruelty on the island.  The novel is the story of evil in the human being and his society. Seeing that there are no adults to restrain them, the children are initially excited.  But Ralph emerges as a leader reminding them of their responsibility to find ways of returning home.  Ralph is a moral character in the novel.  His is a cultivated morality, the product of human civilisation.  Jack, on the other hand, is the uncultivated savage.  He soon wrenches the leadership from Ralph and becomes a dictator who imposes both his will and his...

“Why Blame Religion?” asks Matthew Adukanil in an article of that title published in the Open Page of The Hindu (Oct 13).  [In the online edition of the paper the title is Blame it on politics, not religion .]  The article is a response to an earlier article by Vasant Natarajan, Let’s aim for a post-theistic society .  While Prof Natarajan’s article was a rational and sensible argument why we should strive to create a world without religions, Prof Adukanil’s is sheer trivia fit for catechism classes. Religion and science “are twins, one imparting wisdom and the other knowledge,” argues Adukanil.  There are many problems with such statements.  For example: Does religion really provide wisdom?  If it does, why is it the cause of so much misery in the world?  Why has it engendered so many crusades, holy wars, jihads, terrorists, and other appalling evils?  What about the numerous atheists and agnostics who were/are wise?  Aren’t the...

Courtesy: polyp.org.uk “Most people would rather die than think and most people do,” said Bertrand Russell in his characteristic witty way.   Professor of Philosophy and author of many books, A C Grayling, is of the opinion that religion has continued to survive even in today’s scientific world because people don’t want to think.   They would rather accept readymade answers given by religion.   God is the ultimate readymade answer for a whole lot of problems.   And a very easy answer too. If we really think and evolve our own moral systems instead of borrowing them from religion, we will be far better human beings, says Grayling in his latest book, The God Argument.   If we think sensibly (common sense would do if we cared to use that faculty), we will realise that we all have a duty to contribute to the welfare of the entire human species.   The simple logic is that when the species is “flourishing” (Grayling’s word) we too flourish.   ...

“Sleep tight, you morons,” muttered Arjun as he stepped out of his dorm with a bag slung over his back.   The security guard had rung two bells a few minutes back indicating that it was two o’clock in the night.   The guard must have gone to sleep after performing his duty perfunctorily.   This was the best time to run away. The annual exams were round the corner and Arjun was fully confident that he would fail in spite of all the efforts made by both his teachers and the Board of Education to make him pass by giving him free marks in the name of co-curricular and extra-curricular activities.   He wouldn’t score even ten percent in the written exams. Sreesanth, his hero, was in jail.   Who does not make use of a chance to earn a few lakh rupees more, wondered Arjun.   His father was making lakhs every day.   Arjun’s father, Nakul Kulapati, was a an MLA of the ruling party.   People came to him offering big packets or briefcases fu...

The novel that I started reading yesterday and keeps my attention riveted is Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Dream of the Celt (2012).   Llosa won the Nobel Prize for Literature two years ago.   The reason why I bought this novel of his is not that, however.   The novel is about Roger Casement, a controversial hero of Irish nationalism.   My reason for buying the novel was not that either.   I ordered for the book when I read in a review that the novel was about the barbarism perpetrated by the European colonists in the Congo.   Llosa’s protagonist was an Irishman who went to the Congo with the noble desire to “civilize” the people there.   A few pages into the novel, I am quite delighted to come across Joseph Conrad as a character.   Conrad was a sailor and he met Roger in the Congo.   In Llosa’s novel, Conrad tells Roger that the latter “should have appeared as co-author” of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness . In Heart of Darkness , a charac...