Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Having entered the latter half of my sixties, I view each day as a bonus. People much younger become obituaries these days around me. That awareness helps me to sober down in spite of the youthful rush of blood in my indignant veins. Age hasn’t withered my indignation against injustice, fraudulence, and blatant human folly, much as I would like to withdraw from the ringside and watch the pugilism from a balcony seat with mellowed amusement. But my genes rage against my will. The one who warned me in my folly-ridden youth to be wary of my (anyone’s, for that matter) destiny-shaping character was farsighted. I failed to subdue the rages of my veins. I still fail. That’s how some people are, I console myself. So, at the crossroads of my sixties, I confess to a dismal lack of emotional maturity that should rightfully belong to my age. The problem is that the sociopolitical reality around me doesn’t help anyway to soothe my nerves. On the contrary, that reality is almost entirely re...

Illustration by Gemini AI Fiction Why does the sea rage endlessly? Varghese asked himself as he sat on the listless sands of the beach looking at the sinking sun beyond the raging waves. When rage becomes quotidian, no one notices it. What is unnoticed is futile. Like my life, Varghese muttered to himself with a smirk whose scorn was directed at himself. He had turned seventy that day. That’s why he was on the beach longer than usual. It wasn’t the rage of the waves or the melancholy of the setting sun that kept him on the beach. Self-assessment kept him there. Looking back at the seventy years of his life made him feel like an utter fool, a dismal failure. Integrity versus Despair, Erik Erikson would have told him. He studied Erikson’s theory on human psychological development as part of an orientation programme he had to attend as a teacher. Aged people reflect on their lives and face the conflict between feeling a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction (integrity) or a feeli...

Illustration by Copilot Designer The weekend carried me far. I travelled by Kerala’s state-run buses to a place 250 kilometres from home on Saturday and back home on Sunday. I was going to attend the wedding of the daughter of an old friend. A few other friends were coming too. It was going to be an old pals’ meet in a way. We, the pals, lived under the same roof from 1975 to 1978. We were teenage students then. Now we are all in our mid-sixties. How much has life changed us? I was curious to know that. Life had transformed me in ways I wouldn’t have imagined back then. What about them? The bus journey became quite bumpy and rough as I crossed Trissur and moved towards Kozhikode. The highway was being broadened. A lot of work was going on all along and the dust rushed into the bus prompting me to cover my nostrils with my handkerchief which became a mask. I closed my eyes too. The bus moved on and my mind moved inward. I have already reached the last stage of personal developme...

I stood face to face with Ruskin Bond. He had his characteristic genial smile on his face. My face must have revealed a helpless inhibition which held me back from going to him and the simultaneous desire to go to him and say a Hi at least. I would have loved to have a conversation with him, however brief. That was in 2003. I had taken a student of mine from school for an award ceremony organised by ITC at the ITC Hotel in Mumbai. My student was one of the 15 prize-winners of a short story competition conducted by ITC and their newly launched brand of student-oriented products named Classmate . The awards were being presented by Ruskin Bond who would also release the story anthology. My student who won the award was a fan of Ruskin Bond. But he did not seem the least interested in meeting his favourite writer personally and getting an autograph. He was with the other prize-winners who were all imprinting autographs on one another’s white T-shirts presented to them by ITC and whic...

I visited two unlikely places yesterday along with a friend whom I shall refer to as J. A cousin of J’s was an inmate of a sanatorium meant for men who were shifted from a mental hospital. This cousin had undergone treatment for years at the hospital. Now for the last few years, he is in the sanatorium and he looks perfectly normal. He talks like any other normal person too though years of psychiatric treatment has given him a conspicuous stoop. He seems to find it hard to look up into your eyes as he speaks due to the stoop. But he does smile a lot. There was an occasional laughter too, subdued though it was. “Have you retired?” He asked me. When I answered, his instant remark was, “Your grey hairs gave me the hint.” I had the same grey hairs when I met him two years ago along with J and I was teaching then. He had probably not noticed it that time. But he remembered me and also the fact that I was a teacher though the visit was very brief. “My hairs are grey too,” he added wi...

Pic from Pixabay In psychologist Erik Erikson’s theory, a sense of fulfilment is the sign of a happy old age. As one moves into the latter half of his/her sixties, if one feels contented with one’s own life so far, the old age is going to be ‘cool’. Otherwise, discontentment or even despair is one’s lot in the last years of life. Very few may achieve a sense of complete satisfaction with their own life towards the end. When we look back, there may be causes for regrets. I am a sexagenarian myself racing to the final stage of life as listed by Erikson. When I look back, I can see blunders after blunders committed by me in my youth as well as my adulthood. My growing into maturity was a slow and tedious process. Painful too, quite often. But am I going to sit down and feel regrets? No. “Regret is a temptation,” says Joan Chittister, author of The Gift of Years: Growing Older Gracefully . Regret, she goes on to say, “entices us to lust for what never was in the past rather than to b...

I can hear "Time's winged chariot hurrying near" more clearly and seriously than  Andrew Marvell . People younger than me are bidding the final farewell in my neighbourhood in the post-Covid days. As a young man I used to yearn for death quite often. That longing was more than the Freudian psychological condition known as Thanatos. It was a profound acknowledgement of my own sense of worthlessness as a being. Mediocrity, if not worthlessness. Delhi soothed my Thanatos, however. When you live in a residential school along with all others associated with the school, you stop feeling utterly worthless. There’s something you are good at, you suddenly realise. It may be as simple as identifying the goodness in the other person with whom you share the dining table or the department duties. You can’t live with other people 24x7 unless you learn to see something good wherever you look. And when you see something good all around, Thanatos takes flight. Thanatos has returned...