Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Book Review Title: A Thousand Cuts: An innocent question and deadly answers Author: T J Joseph Translator: Nandakumar K Having read the Malayalam original of this book, I turned to my mobile phone to catch up with the latest news. The first headline that Google gave me is: Darul Huda Islamic University comes out against Literature Festival in Kerala . This book is written by a college professor whose palm was chopped off with a hatchet in 2010 by a group of young Muslim terrorists. He was attacked brutally while he was returning from Sunday church service. He was stabbed in many places and some of the wounds were near-fatal. His palm was chopped off and thrown away. This book, written originally in Malayalam, tells us why the professor was attacked so inhumanly and how it changed his life quite radically. What provoked the terrorists was a particular question that the professor had set in the Malayalam question paper for the undergraduates of his college. It was an internal...

The explosions that shook Kochi yesterday morning brought a lot of messages and phone calls to me. Many of them were from friends of yesteryears, people who hadn’t contacted me for a long time. Their concern did touch me; it made me realise how much goodness there still is in our world. One such call was from Shillong, the place where I worked from 1986 to 2001. The person who called was my colleague for just one year, my first year in Shillong. His call yesterday evening struck me particularly because his concern was immensely palpable. It brought back a flood of memories – my walks with him through the narrow concrete paths of Shillong’s entrails. He knew all the shortcuts in the town and hills have plenty of time-saving shortcuts. He was my first guide in Shillong. Now, retired from government service, he is an active pastor. His concern reached out beyond me as an individual to whole communities as he discussed Kerala's demographics and the intricate relationships between commu...

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 ...

Joseph S Nye, American political scientist, mooted the concept of ‘soft power’ as a means of gaining ascendancy in the world.  Military and economy give a country its hard power.  Soft power is its ability to persuade other countries to want what it wants them to want. Mr Modi is getting the support of many countries against Pakistan using persuasive tactics as well as realpolitik.  He is relying more on soft power and rightly so.  No one but perverted minds would want a war especially between India and Pakistan because such a war is most likely to escalate into a world war. Soft power can be effective only when it rests solidly on the foundation of substantial hard power.  It is also related to culture and ideology.  The Western civilisation spread rapidly across the world because it was firmly established on a secure hard power foundation.  America was a practical El Dorado. Russia’s communism crumpled when its hard power hit the dust...

Yahweh by Michelangelo Recently I stumbled upon a quote from Robert G Ingersoll’s book, Some Mistakes of Moses .  The quote which puts the Jewish God on a dissection table is reproduced below: It is impossible to conceive of a more thoroughly despicable, hateful, and arrogant being, than the Jewish god. He is without a redeeming feature. In the mythology of the world he has no parallel. He, only, is never touched by agony and tears. He delights only in blood and pain. Human affections are naught to him. He cares neither for love nor music, beauty nor joy. A false friend, an unjust judge, a braggart, hypocrite, and tyrant, sincere in hatred, jealous, vain, and revengeful, false in promise, honest in curse, suspicious, ignorant, and changeable, infamous and hideous:—such is the God of the Pentateuch. There are people who believe in such a heartless, mirthless, starkly absurd God too.  It is then that I fell on the contemplation whether most gods aren’t similar on...

Shamsudheen Fareed, a Salafi preacher in Kerala, has decided that Onam, Christmas and other such celebrations are haram.  A lot more things are haram in his version of Islam.  Movies are haram.  Even trimming the beard is! When a person convinces himself that he possesses the ultimate truths, he is destined to live in a bundle of delusions.  Simply because there are no ultimate truths.  Except in science and other rigid systems.  Even in those systems, truths are amenable to corrections.  An Einstein corrected a Newton.  Einstein’s theories are also not ultimate truths.  When it comes to human life and affairs, truths are never ultimate.  We keep learning and understanding them in our own way.  Source Joseph Conrad’s celebrated character, Kurtz ( Heart of Darkness ), is a good example of someone who deluded himself with his own ultimate truths.  He thought he possessed the ultimate truths and he wanted to civili...

A year ago, the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism – The Hague (ICCT) reported that about 4000 people from the West left their homes and countries to join the Islamic State (IS).  Many of them are women.  The reporters had made a special study of the women who joined the terrorist outfit and found that it was difficult to categorise which type of women were particularly drawn to IS. “While most of the girls are young, some as young as fifteen,” says the report,  “there are also mothers with young children who make the trip. Some of the girls have difficulties in school and are said to have an IQ below average,  but there are also women who are highly educated. It also appears that even though a relatively large portion of the girls had (or still have) a troubled childhood, there are some who come from families with no known problems with the authorities. Most of the girls come from religiously moderate Muslim families,  yet some converted to Islam a...

Cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker has shown that people can go to any length and expose themselves to any risk merely to prove that the myths they live by are actually true.  The Brussels bombing is the latest episode in man’s quest for converting myths into truths. Myths are necessary for making life bearable.  How miserable would life be without the consolations offered by the pie that is awaiting us in the sky after death?  How can we survive without those gods at whose feet we can unload the burdens in our hearts? As long as gods remain painkillers and shock absorbers, they are harmless.  But the problem is when their worshippers want to impose their painkillers and shock absorbers as the only entities of the kind on everybody in the world.  Christianity did this for a whole five centuries from about 1050 to 1550 CE in the name of crusades.  Did the world become any better place for all those killings and brutality and conversions and wh...

Fiction Salim slapped himself and said, “Allah, forgive me.” The very sight of Sonal Sharma sent a rush of blood to what his friends called “centre point.”  Sonal was beautiful.  At the age of 17, she had conquered the peak of feminine charm in every possible way.  Her physical figure was statuesque.  She was flighty and coquettish while dealing with the boys in the class but sincerely committed to her studies and topped the class usually.  A future doc.  Salim imagined her in the doctor’s white coat with the stethoscope dangling on the perfect parabola of her bosom.  They were classmates, Salim and Sonal. In many ways she was like his mother, reflected Salim.  Maria, his mother, was a Catholic of Keralite origin though born and brought up in Delhi.  She and Sulaiman met each other on a flight from Delhi to Washington DC.  She was a journalist with a prominent national newspaper and was deputed to report the 1996 Atlanta Ol...

Fiction If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have no love in my heart, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. Reverend Felix Markose was preparing his sermon for the next Holy Assembly.  His flock of sheep would arrive in the morning on the day of the Lord to listen to the word of the Lord.  He, their pastor and mentor, would read the scriptures and deliver the sermon in his inimitable style that is highly appreciated by his flock of faithful sheep.  He would count the sins of the people on his fingertips.  Adultery and fornication, drunkenness and drug addiction, gluttony and sloth, greed and envy, it’s an endless list of human errors.  Sinful creatures.  Lord, have mercy on them! If I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so as to move the mountains, but have no love in my heart, I am nothing. He wondered whether he ever loved anyone.  Except his own voice....

“Let France and those who walk in its path know that they will remain on the top of the list of targets of the Islamic State, and that the smell of death will never leave their noses as long as they lead the convoy of the Crusader campaign, and dare to curse our Prophet. . . . ”  Thus goes the message of the IS delivered soon after the massacre it let loose on Paris. Mourners near the Carillon café and the Petit Cambodge restaurant, two sites of terror attack in Paris.   PHOTOGRAPH BY JEROME DELAY / AP The smell of death seems to be what the IS has fallen in love with.  Andre Glucksmann, French philosopher who died on the 10 th of this month, argued in his book Dostoevsky in Manhattan that modern terrorism including Islamic terrorism is nihilist rather than religious or political.  It is a wild vengeance which is founded on an irresistible urge to annihilate the other.  It is not motivated by any noble goals.  There are no human values which...

More than a hundred innocent children were killed by the Taliban today in Pakistan’s Peshawar.  Many were injured.  Teachers were burnt alive.  All in the name of religion. Nurturing a cruel thought in your mind implies you are cruel.  I remember having read something to that effect long ago in Dag Hammarskjold’s little classical diary, Markings .  How cruel must one be in order to line up innocent children and fire bullets into their hearts?  And they call that religion! Like most religious fundamentalist organisations, the Taliban was born out of a conflicting mix of passions: hatred towards certain sections of people and a childish longing for an ideal world .  Mullah Omar was a barely literate jihadi who had lost his right eye fighting the Russians in Afghanistan.  In 1994 he witnessed a local warlord eliminating an entire family, not before raping every girl in it.  The incident put the fire in the romantic soul of Mu...

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...

When the voice of truth rises from the minarets, The Buddha smiles, And the broken chain of history reconnects. The lines are from the poem, The Relics of Butkara , written by Malala’s father and quoted by her in her autobiography, I am Malala .  I’m still reading the book and found this passage about Butkara, her birthplace, interesting. “Our Butkara ruins were a magical place to play hide and seek,” she writes.  They were relics from the days when Buddhism was practised by the people of the place.  In other words, Malala’s forefathers must have been Buddhists.  The people who are now Muslims have a Buddhist ancestry.  It is that reconnection that Malala’s father speaks about in his poem.  “Islam came to our valley (Swat) in the eleventh century when Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni invaded from Afghanistan and became our ruler, but in ancient times Swat was a Buddhist kingdom,” writes Malala.  “The Buddhists had arrived here in the secon...