Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Illustration by Copilot Designer I disabled Facebook on my phone yesterday. There’s too much vulgarity, subhuman crudity, on it. And the first thing I read this morning was a Malayalam weekly – Samakalika Malayalam from the Indian Express group – whose editorial lamented the treatment meted out on social media to Dr M Leelavathi, renowned Malayalam writer. Leelavathi refused to celebrate her 98 th birthday because she said she was distressed by the pictures of innocent children dying of human-made hunger in Gaza. She was trolled by the Hindu right wing in Kerala for saying that. The editorial mentioned above requests the “Hindutva handles” to leave alone Leelavathi. If Kerala’s beloved poet and educationist was moved to tears by the sight of little children behaving like insane creatures as soon as they espy some food, it only reveals the deep humanity that sustained her poetry as well as her world vision. The editorial went on to mention that 20,000 children were killed by Is...

Is India joining the ranks of North Korea, China, and Russia when it comes to the freedom of the media? India’s rank in the World Press Freedom Index as well as many other similar indices has been declining rapidly in the recent years. The cover story of the December issue of The Caravan magazine, one of the few remaining independent journals in the country, is about how Mukesh Ambani has become the media manager of Narendra Modi. Ambani’s Reliance bought News 18 in July 2014. The year is significant. Modi had just come to power in Delhi. Eventually News 18 bought off many TV channels and journals. The Caravan informs us that using these media Modi is doing exactly what Kim Jong Un has been doing in North Korea, Putin in Russia, and Xi Jinping in China. The first major casualty, when the government takes control of the mass media, is Suppression of free speech and dissent . The Caravan reveals how scores of journalists who refused to propagate what the government wanted the...

I’m becoming increasingly convinced that Facebook [FB] is for the brainless. No wonder why youngsters have abandoned it and taken to other media such as Instagram. FB censored the links to my blog posts twice in succession last week. The posts are innocuous. 1.      The Napalm Girl : The post is about Kim Phuc, the nine-year-old Vietnamese girl who survived one of the most brutal and absurd wars in human history. FB removed my link merely because the post contained the classical photo of the little girl running in pain. FB’s sense of morality stirred its fervent head. But FB permits utter balderdash written by scoundrels! 2.      Women and Breast Politics : This is the other post that met with FB’s idiosyncratic sense of morality. The post is about how women were made to go bare-chested in Kerala till as recently as the turn of the 20 th century. It contained a couple of pictures which I had copy-pasted from an illustrious Malayalam weekl...