Tomichan Matheikal's blog

I am scared of religious people.  Source Come to think of it, the world has never become a better place for all the religious people it has had for centuries.  From the time Moses gave the ten commandments to Yahweh’s chosen people or Manusmriti revealed the sanatana penal code to the chosen race a little more eastward, god’s people have been trying to make man’s world better.  A few thousand years of preaching.  Thousands of gods.  Millions of laws.  Countless places of worship.  Burning candles.  Smoking incense.  Inspiring sermons from infinite pulpits. Religion comes home round the clock on satellite TV channels.  Our very breathing is regulated by religion.  Our food is becoming religious: Prakriti ka ashirwad, for example.  So much religion all around.  So many gods.  Too many gods’ own people.  But dark matter continues to dominate the universe.   Darkness explodes like bombs i...

Book Review “Our country was going crazy.  How was it possible that we were now garlanding murderers?”  (174)*  Malala Yousafzai’s autobiographical book , I am Malala , is the story of how her beloved Swat Valley was overtaken by a bunch of murderers who considered themselves religious reformists.  It is also the story of the Talibanisation of Pakistan in general and the failure of the Pakistani government in dealing with the problem. The book is an eloquent illustration of two conflicting attitudes towards religion: one which tries to understand it rationally and use it for improving the society and the other which wields it as a weapon for oppressing people with the objective of keeping them under its all-pervasive power. As a very young girl Malala started questioning certain aspects of her religion.  Denial of education as well as many other rights to girls and subjugation of women in general were things that she found highly discriminator...

India is governed by a political party which draws its sustenance from the Us-Them divisiveness.  From the infamous Gujarat riots onwards, India witnessed about 7000 incidents of communal violence engendered by the Us-Them thinking. The Us-Them thinking is as old as known human history.  Every people always loved to make some distinctions between themselves and the perceived others .  Look at our movies and you will see how people belonging to other cultures or speaking other languages are made to look like either fools or villains.  Such division achieves many purposes at the same time.  One, it enhances our own sense of identity.  Our group identity becomes stronger when the rival group is portrayed as weak, illiterate, villainous, etc.  Two, it tilts the struggle for the limited resources in our favour.  We turn the tables so that the resources will fall to our side.  Three, it prepares the members of the community to fight...

Dear Mr Narendra Modi, At the outset I ask your pardon for addressing you as Mister rather that something like “Worshipful” because in case you become the Prime Minister of India that’s what you would demand from the citizens.  You like to be worshipped.  You’ve already got (or bought) many of your chelas to sing hymns and display posters projecting you as a god.  However, even if you become the PM I won’t address you as “Worshipful”, let alone imagine you as a god.  I’d rather die. That’s not the issue which prompted me write this letter, however.  It is the report in the front page of today’s Hindu titled Modi fears a ‘pink revolution’ . You fear for the lives of cows in the country.  I have no problem about anyone choosing to worship anything.  Once I attended a meditation course in which the participants were told that we could meditate even on a potato.  Keep a potato in front of you and concentrate on it.  Focus....

The phone rang just as I finished my breakfast. It was my sister calling from Kerala. “Do you remember that professor who got into a controversy with a question he had set for an exam on Muslims?” asked my sister. “Yes, has something happened to him?” I asked with a sense of foreboding. “He was attacked by a group of people this morning and his palms have been chopped off,” said my sister who lives quite near to the college where the professor teaches. I switched on the TV. A Malayalam news channel reported that about eight persons intercepted the professor’s car as he was returning home from church. They were carrying weapons like knives and axes. They also attacked the women in the car though not fatally. My thoughts raced back to J. S. Bandukwala’s article in the latest edition of Outlook which I read last evening and the interview with Salman Rushdie in this morning’s Literary Review of the Hindu. Both Bandukwala and Rushdie are Muslims who think that there is something ser...