Tomichan Matheikal's blog

A 24-year-old Malayalam song gained much attention in Kerala in the past weeks. It is a prayer to God not to come to certain places such as libraries, playgrounds, educational institutions, hospitals, farms, factories, courts of justice, corridors of political power, and a lot more. “Don’t you have enough places of worship to stay?” The song asks God. “We have given you our hearts too for residing. Yet why do you choose to come to the other places as a murderous rage?” Many newspapers reported yesterday about the disappearance of the Preamble to India’s Constitution from the new NCERT textbooks. It is not surprising that the Modi government has chosen to remove the Preamble from schools and many other places. Modi was quite discontented with the word ‘secularist’ in the Preamble right from the time he worked in a non-existent tea stall in Vadnagar railway station. [Despite the fact that the word ‘secularist’ appeared in India’s Constitution for the first time when Modi was 26 years

Lesson No. 1 Firoze Mohomed Shakir (left) Firoze Mohomed Shakir lives in Mumbai.  I have been haunting him like a ghost in some vague quest for quite a time in the virtual places I was permitted access.  His photographs , for example.  What drew me to him initially was his poetry which I used to read via indiblogger.in .  The poems were entirely different from the ones I had ever come across.  They looked initially like prose broken into arbitrary lines.  As I focused more I realized that secularism has as much hope in India as Sufism. Below is his latest poem that I have copy-pasted from his status update in Facebook.  The postscript also belongs to him. [Dear Firoze, I hope you don’t mind my using you as a lesson. Personally, I’d rather be a Hindu (to use your words) than be religious!] I Would Rather Be a Hindu Than Be a Wahhabi yes   i would rather be called a kafir   than be a wahabbi   i would rather be a hindu   than be a wahhabi   both options   clos