Tomichan Matheikal's blog

One of the easiest things we can do is to masquerade hatred as love.   Most of the present day patriots (or nationalists, as they consider themselves) are motivated by hatred though they think that it is love of their nation that guides them.   It is the hatred of a particular section of people that really motivates these patriots. Hence the violence that underlies the patriotism. If you genuinely love your country, you will find ways of promoting its welfare.   Love is not destructive.   Love does not kill.   Cruelty is cruelty even if you bring in gods and scriptures to justify it.   In the olden days religious people sacrificed animals to appease gods.   That was cruelty to animals though not perceived as such by worshippers.   Today’s religious people sacrifice human beings belonging to other creeds in order to appease gods.   Whether gods are appeased or not, one can eliminate enemies with the contentment of a devout worshipper when religion is invoked to sanction cr

Religion has always been a tool for oppressing sections of people so that the oppressors can uphold their own interests easily.  In our own country, some clever men ( men , and not women) invented a supernatural creature in order to establish the caste system which was highly oppressive for the vast majority of people.  A small minority became the most powerful people who controlled gods, the scriptures (rubrics and canons as well as truths), politics by subordinating the kings and their warriors, and everybody else.   From the time Christianity became the religion of the Roman Empire, it ceased to be a religion of love and compassion.  Thousands of people were eliminated labelled as heretics, witches, pagans, and so on.  Islam has its own jihads of all sorts which oppress and even eliminate whole sections of people. Connected with the oppressor role of religion are the material benefits it brings.  The priestly classes always enjoyed infinite benefits.  The Brahmins

The worst sin is the refusal to confront one’s inner demons.  Redemption lies in accepting those demons and learning to grapple with them.  This is the fundamental theme of Khaled Hosseini’s celebrated novel, The Kite Runner . “... a boy who won’t stand up for himself becomes a man who won’t stand up to anything.”  Rahim Khan, one of the characters, tells Amir the protagonist. Rahim was actually quoting the words of Amir’s father who had assessed his son when the latter was a boy.  Amir never stood up for himself because there was always Hassan, his childhood friend, to stand up for him.  Hassan had no inner demons shelved away neatly in any inner recess of his consciousness. He confronted life as it presented itself to him.  When it was necessary to fight bullies, he did so bravely.  He did the fighting on behalf of Amir too.  But Amir betrayed him.  Amir surrendered to the demon of cowardice.  Every surrender to the inner demons leaves one with guilt.  Amir’s father

Mahatma Gandhi, whose death anniversary is commemorated today, is still relevant precisely because of the gulf between him and our contemporary leaders.  What sets Gandhi poles apart is the harmony or congruence that existed between his thought, word and deed.  He called that harmony ‘truth’.  He was a man of truth.  Since truth is not a fixed entity he experimented with it.  That is, he was constantly discovering truth.  His life was an ardent pursuit of truth.  He might have erred occasionally as any human being does however noble he or she may be.  But his pursuit was genuine.  He was genuine. The absolute lack of masks is what makes Gandhi as relevant as any genuinely spiritual leader would be at any time, even centuries after his or her death.  It is those who put on different masks to suit various occasions that need to separate religion from politics, public life from private life.  “My life is my message,” Gandhi asserted boldly because he never needed any mask at any

Donald Trump is an exceptional man in many ways.  He proved that during his swearing in ceremony too.  He took the oath placing his palm on two bibles one of which was presented by his mother and the other was used by none other than Abraham Lincoln. I have always wondered what religion really means to people like Trump whose hearts are awash with hatred (in addition to greed, lust, and much else).  Trump has his own ‘amen corner’ in Paula White’s place of worship.  Ms White is one of the spiritual advisers of Trump.  In fact, no less than six such religious persons including Ms White prayed for Trump during his swearing in ceremony.  Two bibles and six preachers.  And a lot of allegations of the sleazy kind behind the backdrop.  Trump is indeed an exceptional man. The religious people who prayed over him are also exceptional.  Paula White uses religion as a commercial enterprise.  She is a Prosperity-gospel preacher.  God wants you to be rich: that’s their basic teachi

One of my favourite books in my early twenties was Richard Bach’s Illusions .  It begins with the story of a water creature whose fellow beings spent their entire lifetimes clinging to the river bottom “for clinging was their way of life.”  This one creature decided one day that its existence was absurd.  “Clinging, I shall die of boredom,” it said and let itself go. It went down the stream trusting itself to the current.  The creatures downstream said, “See a miracle!  A creature like ourselves, yet he flies!  See the messiah, come to save us all!” The creature told them that he was no messiah.  That only they could be their own messiahs.  He asked them to let go and embark upon the adventure that life really is. But the creatures loved to cling.  Clinging was what they were used to for generations and generations.  Clinging, they made stories about a Messiah who came to deliver them once upon a time.  Richard Bach’s story ends there.  We may carry on and say tha

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 the endless rungs of the ascent. 

In Orhan Pamuk’s novel, My Name is Red , a dog takes offence when a religious preacher calls his enemies dogs.  “It is common knowledge that hajis, hojas, clerics and preachers despise us dogs,” says Dog who thinks that it is because the Prophet [“peace and blessings be upon him”] once displayed a special affection to a cat by cutting off a piece of his robe on which the cat was sleeping rather than disturb the creature.  Says Dog, “By pointing out this affection shown to the cat, which has incidentally been denied to us dogs, and due to our eternal feud with this feline beast, which even the stupidest of men recognizes as an ingrate, people have tried to intimate that the Prophet himself disliked dogs.” The dog knows that religious likes and dislikes can be shaped as easily as the scriptures can be interpreted variously to suit each one’s taste and motive.  The dog is religious too.  It is proud of the fact that a dog it was that guarded the seven young men who took refuge in

Recently I saw a Christian catechism book which described Albert Einstein as a firm believer in God.  Nothing is farther from the truth. In his biography Einstein clearly states that his “deep religiousness” came to “an abrupt end” at the age of twelve when he realised that established authorities like the state and religions were deceiving people with “lies”.  As an adolescent Einstein developed a “mistrust of every kind of authority” because he could see through the falsehood that upheld the authorities.  Yet Einstein was religious in the sense that he saw sanctity in the universe.  “I believe in Spinoza’s* God,” declared Einstein, “who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and doings of mankind.”  Answering a scientist who questioned Einstein’s reported religious faith, Einstein wrote, “If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so fa

The day Donald Trump strutted proudly to the White House, The Guardian concluded an article about Trumpism with the following paragraph: The religious right is in retreat, and the political appeal of free-market fundamentalism is fading. Republican strategists will now turn to Trumpism to replenish the well, enlisting its many supporters and sympathizers as foot soldiers for a new era of rightwing ascendancy. Now that Trump has reached the White House, the era of Trumpism has just begun. Source: Trump As Lord Vishnu? How Hindus In America Are Campaigning For Donald Trump Some sort of right wing balderdash always holds sway over collective imagination whether in America or India.  Religion may be losing its traditional sheen.  But it keeps reincarnating in the form of gau mata or Trumpism or something of the sort. But is religion really “in retreat”?  This is one question that refused to leave me after reading the Guardian article yesterday.  So I researched using