Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Susmesh Chandroth in his kitchen “Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought,” Poet Shelley told us long ago. I was reading an interview with a prominent Malayalam writer, Susmesh Chandroth, this morning when Shelley returned to my memory. Chandroth says he left Kerala because the state had too much of affluence which is not conducive for the production of good art and literature. He chose to live in Kolkata where there is the agony of existence and hence also its ecstasies. He’s right about Kerala’s affluence. The state has eradicated poverty except in some small tribal pockets. Today almost every family in Kerala has at least one person working abroad and sending dollars home making the state’s economy far better than that of most of its counterparts. You will find palatial houses in Kerala with hardly anyone living in them. People who live in some distant foreign land get mansions constructed back home though they may never intend to come and live here. There are ...

India is passing through a historical period of self-purification.  Our Prime Minister is putting an end to black money and corruption.  Our Supreme Court is feeding patriotism into our hearts via cinema halls.  Now the apex court has weaned our politics from our gods.  125 crore Indians may go down in history as the people who sanitised a whole polity. Can politics exist without corruption?  Can greed be washed out of human hearts?  Can religion be separated from public affairs especially politics? Politics and Corruption Corruption is an integral part of politics simply because politics is about power and power is about subordination of most people by a few.  Subordination, swindling, manipulation, exploitation... these are the normal synonyms of power unless you are a dyed-in-the-wool idealist.  There is no power structure without bribery, cronyism, nepotism, extortion, parochialism, embezzlement, and whatever helps one climb up...

Once I presented a copy of the book, Amen , by Sister Jesme to a couple who visited me.  A few days later I came to know that the husband had flung it out of the car as they were returning home.  “I won’t let such books in our home,” he said as he stopped the car near one of the many garbage heaps belonging to the Municipal Corporation. Sister Jesme’s book is not a particularly outstanding work in any way.  It shows that the Catholic Church is as corrupt as any human institution is.  It elaborates on the sins and human weaknesses that exist in the religious congregation to which the nun (Sister Jesme) belonged until she left it in disgust as well as the realisation that it was meaningless to continue living a life of sheer hypocrisy.  I gifted it to the couple because the lady had shown some interest in it when she saw it on my book shelf and also because the gentleman was very closely associated with the Church and would not allow any criticism of the C...

Source As soon as the power fails, the mosquitoes fly in from God-knows-where.  The mosquito repellent is the fortress which they cannot penetrate.  Blessed be the man who invented it.  Blessed is the man who does not suck others’ blood and prevents others from doing it. Mosquitoes are born to suck blood.  Even at the milk-swollen breasts, they will suck only blood.  The very purpose of their existence is to suck blood and to blast our eardrums with their buzz.  They think they are entertaining us with their music.  And they put up their daises where three or four creatures gather innocuously, for purchasing the provisions for the body or for their tête-à-tête with their god, food for the soul.  All around the dais they will erect monstrous loud speakers.  And the buzz will begin.  Ear-splitting buzz.  The buzz will lull us to sleep.  And then they suck our blood.  Giving our blood, we attain our orgasms. ...

Killing has always been the job of the religious.  They kill for their gods and the gods are always happy.  Death is the pastime of the gods.  And of those who are close to the gods.  Remember the sacrifices stipulated by the Vedas? Remember the crusades made by the Christian missionaries in the medieval period? At least, remember the terrorist attacks of our own days? The politics of the gods.  If you're not sick of them, you have mastered the art of killing. 

Fiction Mr Padgaonkar was having his usual Scotch whisky on rocks when his mobile phone rang its calling tune of Rang de Basanti .   A call that cannot be ignored.   Not by the editor of the leading national newspaper.   A call from the PMO.   “Cut it out,” ordered the speaker. “I will,” said Mr Padgaonkar with the obedience of a defiant school student in front of his most favourite teacher. The Prime Minister’s Office had taken note of a news item on the newspaper’s website announcing the rewriting of the country’s history by changing the heads of ICHR and NCERT.  The office didn’t want it to be news; it was a clandestine affair which was meant for today’s students and their teachers. “All the advertisements...” “... will be cancelled.  I know.  Cut out that shit,” asserted the editor.  “I know the business.”  He has been running the business for more years than the Prime Minister had run politics even in his own s...

Mata Amritanandamayi celebrated her birthday yesterday.  India's topmost leader (since PM is away in the States) sought her blessings. Kerala Chief Minister, Oommen Chandy, did not want to be left behind in his own state. Chandy knows how to smile even when the treasury is empty.  Mata's blessings. Poor Jayalalithaa.  In spite of all the crores she had amassed and in spite of the additional 'a' in her name attached in obedience to the cosmic laws dictated by spiritual powers.  Prisoner number 7402. Did she miss out somewhere?  Like, she never bent down to touch anybody's feet?  She had an ego bigger than even politician is supposed to have?  Had she begun to see herself as a Mata when there are real Matas elsewhere ruling the roost? Life is such fun in our days.  Politics is far more entertaining than Bigg Boss :) Courtesy: All images from today's Malayala Manorama newspaper. 

Teacher was very fond of parrots.  They keep repeating A, B, C... And when they grow up they repeat s = ut + ½ at 2 or sin 2 Ɵ + cos 2 Ɵ = 1.  When they grow up more they keep repeating “Yes, sir; Yes, madam.”  That’s why Teacher decided to take over the caged parrot from his cousin who was leaving the village to settle down in one of the posh apartments in Delhi.   The cousin had just won the Lok Sabha bye-election. Teacher was not characteristically ignorant and so he knew that keeping birds in cages was against the law.  Love does not follow laws, however. Teacher was very upset when Parrot spoke.  It did not speak the formulas.  Instead it uttered expletives.  Teacher decided to teach Parrot.  “A, B, C...” Parrot said, “AAP, BJP, Congress...”  As if that were not enough, Parrot added some expletive to each word it uttered. Teacher presented the problem to Counsellor.  Every school must have a counsello...

Today (July 28) is the centenary of World War I (WWI).  The War started as a family affair and then spread to the whole world because of more family affairs.  Wars are, more often than not, family affairs even today.  We, the human beings, are still as clannish as we were when our forefathers descended from the tree and started feeling ashamed of the groins that gave birth to families.  Shame breeds wars.  Shame is the other side of honour.   What triggered WWI was the murder of the Austrian archduke Francis Ferdinand.  The year was 1914.  France was already a republic and England was a constitutional monarchy.  The rest of Europe remained conservative monarchies.  But the monarchies were already feeling the fire beneath their bottoms because of what had happened in France and England.  The common man was beginning to assert himself. It was a common man who shot the archduke Francis Ferdinand.  A common man’s crim...

Europe was labouring under the weight of a socio-political system when Enlightenment dawned on it in the 17 th and 18 th centuries.  Most European countries had a hierarchical system with the King or the Queen occupying the top position claiming to have derived his/her power directly from none other than God.  Then there were the priests of the Church who not only brought God’s power to the King or the Queen but also enjoyed a lot of benefits of that power in their own royal ways.  Below the clergy reclined the aristocrats.  All these three together sucked the blood of the common people who did all the work and paid all the taxes. The philosophers who questioned this system usually belonged to the aristocratic classes.  But they possessed the sensitivity to feel the inhumanity of the system.  Thus Rousseau (1712-1778) lamented the chains that shackled man everywhere.  The encyclopaedists redefined ‘political authority’ and ‘natural liberty’....

Proceed at your own risk “I contend that there are no whole truths , there are only pertinent truths – and pertinence, you must agree, is always a matter of perspective .” The quote is from the arduous novel that won the Booker Prize last year, The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton.  The emphases are added by this author who is still plodding through the novel one week after he started reading it. When Mr Narendra Modi, the Emperor of the South Asian Region, invited the whole Luminaries of the (defunct) SAARC continent to his coronation ceremony, truth began to wiggle and wriggle in my solar plexus until it became a paroxysm.   I had decided to ignore politics in my writing.  But my new Prime Minister won’t let me do it, it seems.  He is the actor par excellence.  Nobody in Indian politics will ever outshine him in histrionics, I am quite sure. Robert Graves may be inspired to resurrect himself from his grave to write yet another sequel to ...

Fiction My husband was arrested tonight.  What was his crime?  He used a bicycle to travel from home to his office and back.  We live in Bhatti Mines, a wild side of Delhi where the jungle mingles with the spiritual.  Bhatti Mines is a reserved forest, strictly speaking.  But the forest has been encroached upon by people of all sorts.  They say that we are encroachers too though we lived here long before the land was declared reserved forest.  They tried to throw us out of here many, many years ago.  We refused to go.  So Sanjay Gandhi, Indira Gandhi’s infamous son, decided to leave this land to us.  Our ancestors called it Sanjay Colony in his honour.  Our ancestors were too illiterate to know what Sanjay Gandhi meant, let alone what his politics meant.  Today, long after Sanjay Gandhi and his sterilisations are dead, when the land has been declared reserved forest, there are all kinds of religious people who cal...

The front page of today’s [22 Feb 2014]  Malayala Manorama (a newspaper with 20 million readers) reports that Narendra Modi has made a contract with the Marxist Party [CPI(M)] in Kerala.  The Marxists in Kerala turned capitalists long ago when Pinarayi Vijayan took over the Party.  V S Achuthandan (with his foot in the grave) questioned the capitalist tendencies of the Party, the result being that he was bullied by those who control the economy. Marxists are turning capitalists all over the world.  Let’s forgive Achuthandan for growing old and yet not retiring.  Idealists don’t retire, unfortunately . Modis flourish.   And gather followers.  Achuthandan was invited to join AAP [Aam Aami Party].  By none other than Arvind Kejriwal himself.  But how can a senior join a junior party?  Ego problem.  What really bothers me is the report that Mr Modi offered to pay money for buying up votes in Kerala. ...

In a village in Kerala, Mathew bought a cow.  It was a beautiful GM (genetically modified) creature which promised to yield enough milk to support Mathew’s basic needs.  Mathew had no needs more than the basic ones.  The only problem was that Mathew didn’t know how to milk a cow.  His very next neighbour on the western side was a man named Krishnan who was a velichapadu (oracle in a Hindu temple in Kerala) but was an adept at milking cows.  After all, one becomes a velichapadu only much after one becomes something else in life.  Krishnan was happy to get an opportunity to utilise his best skill.  He came early in the morning and went to the beautiful young cow who had delivered her first calf a  few days ago.  The moment he touched her udder the beautiful thing reacted.  One kick.  Krishnan fell on his bums and took a somersault by kinetic force.  “No problem, I’ll bring a sacred thread from the pujari (pri...

“Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things,” said Management guru, Peter Drucker.  Many institutions as well as nations have gone down the tunnel of damnation merely due to lack of good leadership, though their management was good.  Doing things right is not a guarantee that one is doing the right things.  When the Jews wanted to stone the adulteress to death, they were doing things right.  When Jesus told them, “Let him who has not sinned cast the first stone,” he was doing the right thing.  [John 8:1-11] The Hindu newspaper today [22 Oct] carries a review of Maya Tudor’s book, The Promise of Power: The Origins of Democracy in India and Autocracy in Pakistan.   Both India and Pakistan had the same origins: a British colony.  Yet India became a democracy that empowered the people and Pakistan became a theocracy which enervated its citizens.   Why did it happen? The answer lies in the differ...

I’m not surprised that the Harvard University invited Lalu Prasad Yadav to deliver a lecture on management.  If he could create horns for pigs, Harvard could colonise paradise.  The cartoon is taken from the latest issue of Tehelka .  The magazine says that Lalu’s Rs950-crore scam that sent him to jail (which he will make a paradise inviting the Harvard professors to visit him) had some “fantastic” statistics.  For example: “... Rs 15 lakh worth of mustard oil for polishing horns of buffaloes and pigs (yes, pigs) and several crores for transporting cattle on oil tankers, police vans, autorickshaws, and scooters (yes, scooters)."[emphasis added] The title of the article is: “TAKING THE STATE FOR A RIDE: How a CM & Co gamed the system.” I think the cartoonist should have added horns to the pigs on the scooter. Lalu Yadav should be given management lessons in oiling  the horns of pigs in the jail.    How long will ord...

Short Story When they killed my husband, it was the spirit of undaunted daring and unfailing love that was murdered. You romanticise the love that Shahjahan bore for Mumtaz because he erected that mausoleum called Taj Mahal in memory of his supposedly unfailing love for Mumtaz.  But Mumtaz was just one among the many wives and concubines on whose bosoms Shah Jahan expended his lust night after night.  Your historians will romanticise the heroism of many a ruler just because they went far and wide marauding and massacring. My husband may find no place in such histories.  But he was a genuine hero and romantic lover, a rare combination.  He fought the battles of life more bravely than any conqueror.  He loved me passionately, more than any Mughal emperor loved any of his women. Yet the universe conspired against him just as mediocrity conspires against the genius.  He was subjected to so many deaths.  Deaths in life.  Khusru, my belov...