Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Book Review Title: Conversations with Aurangzeb Author: Charu Nivedita Translated from Tamil by Nandini Krishnan Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2023 Pages: 335 History claims to give us truths and fiction really gives us glimpses into truths. Tamil novelist Charu Nivedita’s Conversations with Aurangzeb is in fact history masquerading as a novel. It is fiction inasmuch as Aurangzeb makes an apparition through a medium to the narrator who is a writer doing some research for his next novel. But it is not a novel because there is nothing that can be called a plot. It’s all conversation between the narrator and the spirit of the Mughal emperor. Occasionally a few other characters make their appearances, but they don’t add anything to the plot. How much can we trust history? This is the question that the writer explores in this novel. It is a cliché that history is written by the winners. It gets rewritten when new winners emerge. For example, India’s history is being rewritt...

Historians are not sure whether Padmavati is a mere legend or a historical figure.  That doesn’t matter either.  Objective truth is not the concern of most people.  People want convenient truths.  People want truths that serve their practical purposes.  Most religious truths belong to that category.  Padmavati is also one such expedient truth.  What is that truth?  I am Rani Padmavati, the Queen of Chittor.  People call me the Queen of Beauty.  I have never understood why our men bother about beauty at all.  They are warriors and love fighting. Bravery, physical strength and honour are the values they really cherish and want all of us to possess.  We cherish beauty too.  But we’d prefer to keep beauty veiled behind the purdah.  If anyone other than the husband dares to raise the purdah, he will be killed.  Beauty is a private property among us.  We, the women, are our men’s private properties. ...

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 a...

His hobby was watching spiders chase flies. Spiders wove their webs and waited. Sooner than later some fly was sure to be trapped in the treacherously gossamer web. There’s a preordained affinity between flies and spider webs, he thought as he watched the spider rush with the glee of a conqueror to devour the trapped fly. ‘I’m like this fly,’ he muttered to himself. His religion was the spider web and its priests were the spiders. The Lords of the Ma’amad, having known of the evil opinions and acts of Baruch de Spinoza, have endeavoured by various means and promises, to turn him from his evil ways... (1632-1677) He remembered the verdict passed on him by the Ma’amad, the Council of Elders, when he was just 23 years old. His crime was that he had questioned their truths. Their truths were falsehoods for him. Their truths were illusions. Their truths were fabricated gossamer webs. He showed them the real truths. Truths, naked and unembellished, which would set them fr...

“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of all?” The Queen stood before the mirror and asked as usual.  The response was also the usual one: “My Queen, you are the fairest one of all.” The Queen was never tired of this exercise which went on ad infinitum, ad nauseam.  But the nausea was mine.  Only mine. The Queen, like most people, relished the flattery mistaking it for truth. “You accuse me wrongly,” complained the Mirror. No, it was not a complaint really. I took it as a complaint because I, like most people, judge others according to my own nature. I have a tendency to complain and so I think others also are like that. But the Mirror is not like me. It merely makes statements and not opinions stained by emotions. It tells the truth, in simple words. I don’t tell too many truths, like most people. But unlike most people, I can’t flatter. When I see something unfair or unjust I am tempted to point it out though I, like most people, learnt that it was...

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...

Rollo May, psychologist, thought of conformity as one of the greatest vices of man.  “The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it’s conformity,” he asserted repeatedly.  You are not fully alive, not even fully human, unless at some point of time you felt that the world around you is wrong and you wanted to scream at it, “This is me and the world be damned.”  Isn’t that what Socrates did?  Isn’t that what Jesus did? People love conformity.  It makes life much easier.  It is easy to swim with the current, to move with the herd, to be a faceless shape in the crowd.  It is not just easy, it is beneficial too.  Trophies belong to those who abide by the rules of the game.  Pain, on the other hand, is the essential companion of the one who chooses to stand out. No one becomes fully human painlessly, Rollo May quoted Dostoevsky.  Pain is what you undergo necessarily when you choose to be what you are rather than what ...

Source One of the poems that has never ceased to fascinate me is Keats’ La Belle Dame sans Merci .  Recently the poem featured in my blog post, Secrets of the Knight .  The haggard Knight also features momentarily in the novel I’m writing.  At the age of 16, the protagonist of the novel writes an English assignment titled The Quest of Keats’ Knight , which his English teacher, Father Joseph Kunnel, finds scandalous.  While the priest was doing everything within his capacity to bring up the boy as a God-fearing Catholic, the boy seemed bent upon following in the disastrous footsteps of the romantic poet’s Knight.  Let me quote the relevant lines from the novel. The real mercilessness of la Belle Dame lies in her “titillating tantalisation,” argued the essayist. “Titillating tantalisation!”  Father Joseph was stuck on that phrase for quite a long while.  Interesting, he thought.  All human quest for the meaning of life is sure to e...

Historical Fiction “What is truth?” Sitting in his dismal cell in the Tower of London, Francis Bacon started his inquiry into the metaphysics of truth.  He was found guilty on no less than 23 charges of corruption.  If Edward Coke, his lifelong enemy, was not the leader of the investigation team, he would have been found innocent.  The Tower Such is truth.  Bacon knew it very well.  Truth depends on which side of the power you are.  That is why even Jesus could not answer the question. “What is truth?” asked Pilate to Jesus.  Bacon continued his inquiry.  He was writing an essay.  Pilate did not wait for the answer.  Nor did Jesus answer.  The answer would have served no purpose for either.  Truth is what serves your purpose. “Truth is like pearl looking best in daylight,” wrote Bacon.  “But it will not rise to the price of a diamond that looks best in varied lights.  A mixture of lie always ad...

Historical Fiction “Generally speaking, truth has been suffered to exist in the world just to the extent that it profited the rulers of society.”   [Barrows Dunham, Man Against Myth , 1947] “And yet it moves,” mumbled Galileo as he walked out of the Inquisition Chamber having accepted the punishment imposed on him for upholding the truth.  Galileo (1564-1642) The earth is not the centre of the universe.  Galileo had argued.  The sun was the centre of the solar system.  The earth moved round the sun.  The earth was just another planet like many others. “Your teaching explicitly contradicts the Holy Scripture,” said Cardinal Bellarmine.  “You run the risk of being branded a heretic and being burnt at the stake.  “We exhort you to abandon the mathematical hypothesis completely and unconditionally.  You will not hold the opinion that the sun stands still and the earth moves.  You will not henceforth hold, teach, or defe...

“What is an illusion?” asked Rahul when he caught up with me during my stroll on the campus after dinner.  I was used to a lot of such questions from Rahul, one of my favourite students. “Look at the sky,” I said.  A few stars were visible notwithstanding Delhi’s polluted skies.  “Do you think all those are real stars?” “Aren’t they?”   Rahul was confused.  “We are seeing them.” “Yes, we are seeing them.  Do you know how many years it takes for the light of a star to reach us here on the earth?” “The light from the nearest star takes more than 4 light years,” said Rahul. “Good,” I said.  “It takes many more years for the light from the other stars to reach us.  Many of the stars die by the time their light is seen by us here on the earth.  So how many of those stars are real?” “Sir,” Rahul appeared slightly confused. “Are you suggesting that what is not real is an illusion.” “Well, almost,” said I.  “...