Tomichan Matheikal's blog

The book which I am now reading is God is not great: How religion poisons everything by Christopher Hitchens.  In the very first chapter the author says: “Religious faith is, precisely because we are still-evolving creatures, ineradicable.  It will never die out, or at least not until we get over our fear of death, and of the dark, and of the unknown, and of each other.  For this reason, I would not prohibit it even if I thought I could.” [emphasis in original] The author is an atheist.  His book is a serious philosophical critique of religion.  Yet he is generous enough to let religions be.  That is the spirit of all genuine atheists.  All genuine atheists I have come across so far display similar generosity and tolerance.  By genuine , I mean atheism chosen by an individual after due consideration, reflection and understanding.  Hitchens goes on to ask a question: But will the religious grant me the same indulgence?”  A few lines later, he says that religion is incapabl

A former student of mine who is a diehard supporter of the BJP and its radicalism wrote on Facebook: “So some of the political parties in my country has (sic) a stern view that 'Astrology' is no science.”  I don’t know if the political parties in India have really stern views about anything, let alone astrology.  Isn’t politics, particularly the kind one finds in India, all about opportunism?  Even the BJP, my student’s own party, would have made all kinds of flip-flops had it not won the absolute majority in the Lok Sabha elections, hugging strange bedfellows and cooking up a bizarre coalition.  The drama that unfolded in Maharashtra after the Assembly elections is a mild indicator of the nature of politics in India. The stars in the heavens do not alter their positions a bit while such dramas unfold all over the world.  Do the stars affect our lives in any significant way?  When the Earl of Kent said in Shakespeare’s King Lear , “It’s the stars, / The stars above

Yuval Noah Harari’s book, Sapiens: a brief history of humankind , was a best seller when it was originally published in Hebrew in Israel.  The English version is released in hardbound form.  I’m waiting for the paperback edition and will definitely get hold of one as soon as it is available.  Why?  Harari’s ideas are revolutionary, radical and tickling.  Let me focus on one of the main themes. How did man come to dominate the earth though there were many other more powerful animals on the earth?  As I gather from an article which introduced me to Harari’s book, man created stories which in turn created an immense sense of cooperation among people.  Let us understand that better.  The other animals don’t create stories.  Man creates stories about many things like gods, nations, money, human rights, etc.  These are all imaginary entities given reality to by man’s stories.  What does the thousand rupee note actually mean without the support of the story created by people a

My blindness will cost you more than the sight of the other guides, said the eyeless man to Ibn Battuta, me. I started this journey as a pilgrimage, the Hajj that ensures the soul the bliss of Paradise. But Paradise is here, on the earth, I learnt as I travelled through Dar al-Islam. Mountains and valleys, rivers and deserts, The birds that fly and the snakes that crawl, The infinite variety of hypnotic women Whose men are grappling with fate In the torrid ruggedness of their life. Sight is a curse, said my blind guide, in the desert where a wind can shift a mountain. The sand dune you see now is a valley after a storm. Trust not your eyes in the land of illusions. Trust not your ears in the land whose air echoes the songs of spirits and calls of phantoms. Trust not your senses in the land of Ostriches that bury their sight in sand. Trust me, I’m the blind man of the desert whose heart beats with insights; I’m the blind man who sees

“I knew you would come to deliver me from my stony existence,” Ahalya said touching Rama’s feet. “I’m just a means,” Rama said with an understanding smile.  “Deliverance is one’s own choice, not given by somebody else.” “But your touch sent grace flowing through my being.  I could feel it.  I felt the stone within me melting away.  The lightness of my being now brings me bliss untold.” Ahalya - a Ravi Varma painting Ahalya was living in a granite cave ever since the intercourse she had had with Indra, the lord of svargaloka.  Gods can transform your life in either way, she realised.  Here is a god who liberated her from the monolith that weighed down her consciousness, a monolith that was put there in her consciousness by another god. She had become a monolith after Indra visited her that day when her husband, Sage Gautama, old man with wrinkled skin and matted hair, had gone to fetch the materials required for his religious oblations.  Indra looked like Gautama

When all is told We cannot beg for pardon. [Louis MacNiece, ‘The Sunlight on the Garden’] You cannot hide everything behind the façade of lies, however beautiful the façade is. What will pain you the most and appal those who had stood in awe will be the horror of the grin that the mask had concealed hitherto. Trade in dreams cannot go on forever, false promises will breed barren fever, the phantoms crafted in the past won’t be quelled with rituals of exorcism, confessions and angst will accompany. When all is revealed you won’t have the right to seek pardon.

“ Satyameva jayate ” is India’s national motto.   That may be one of the many ironies in a county steeped in corruption of all sorts.  Truth and falsehood go hand in hand in India.  That’s why we, Indians, never had the concept of the devil in our mythology.  We never polarised the good and the evil into watertight compartments.  Our gods were a queer mixture of both good and evil.  That’s one of the best things about our civilisation. Neither truth nor falsehood is absolute except in the pure sciences.  In actual life, they mingle obscenely.  Narendra Modi’s admission that he has a wife is a recent glaring manifestation of that mingling.  Why did he admit it now in the nomination papers submitted by him at Vadodara?  Is it any indication that the truth is catching up with Modi?  I don’t think so.  Modi is more shrewd than Chanakya, Goebbels, or Machiavelli.  Modi must be having some trick up his sleeve by disclosing his marital status at this point of time, the cynic in

A manager, who had just returned from a Motivation Seminar, called an employee into his office and said, “Hence forth you are going to be allowed to plan and control your job.  That will raise productivity considerably, I am sure.” “Will I be paid more?” asked the worker. “No, no.  Money is not a motivator and you will get no satisfaction from a salary raise.  Happiness comes from within, you know.” “Well, if I do my job better and production does increase, will I be paid more?” “Look,” said the manager.  “You obviously do not understand the motivation theory.  Take this book home and read it; it explains what it is that really motivates you.” As the man was leaving, he turned and asked, “If I read this book will I be paid more?” The above story is taken from Anthony de Mello’s book of parables, The Prayer of the Frog . The moral given by the author is: “Truth does not lie in theories.” A meeting which I attended today motivated me to bring this

Short Story The King was acutely aware of the smallness of his stature.   In fact he was the smallest man among all his adult citizens.   Even the queen stood half a foot taller.   He sought to solve the problem by making his crown as tall as possible so that the crest of the golden crown would stand above the heads of his citizens if at all he would ever come into contact with them.    A king cannot live without ever coming into some contact with some people.   Every such contact made the King feel small.   He tried to masquerade the smallness with self-flattery.   “I am very popular among the citizens, aren’t I?” he would ask his ministers.   Or, “How was the cultural show I arranged last evening?”   “Isn’t my new robe designed by Christian Lacroix a marvel?”   Ministers are people who have mastered the art of diplomacy and self-flattery invariably loves to call a spade a clade.   Nevertheless there is an awareness that lies deep beneath the surfaces of flattery and diplomacy

A friend sent me the other day two articles on Soren Kierkegaard which reminded me of the bicentenary of the Danish philosopher’s birth.  Philosophers, probably, belong to a species that’s becoming extinct.  Nevertheless, it’s worthwhile, if not necessary, to take a glance at some of the old philosophies.  Kierkegaard’s most famous phrase is “leap into faith.”  The philosopher argued that there is a profound insecurity in human life.  Life is one contingency after another.  The only certainty is death.  The other certainties or truths have to be created by each one of us as we move through life. What is required in the process is the willingness to risk a leap of faith.  Becoming human is a project , argued Kierkegaard.  Our task is not so much to discover who we are but to create ourselves at every moment.  Kierkegaard identified 3 stages of life experience. 1.        The aesthetic : This is the stage at which we search for fulfilment in activities such as romanc

An individual’s behaviour (“strategic conduct,” to be more precise, as phrased by Anthony Giddens, sociologist) is based largely on how s/he interprets his/her environment, or the reality around.  But what is reality? How real is my laptop?  The ancient Greek philosopher (to start with our ancestral wisdom) Plato would say that the idea of the laptop is more real and this particular laptop. Ideas are more real for Plato than particular concrete things. Modern science will tell me about the various components that make up my laptop which in turn are made up of atoms which consist of subatomic particles which are made up of more fundamental particles!  Which among all these is real? This post is a sort of continuation of my previous one titled Truth is Beauty .  I think we cannot speak of truth unless we tackle the issue of reality. People see reality differently.  Hence truth too varies according to people.  For most people the scientific world of atoms and suba

“What is truth?” Pontius Pilate, the Roman procurator, asked Jesus.  The Bible [John 18:38] does not quote Jesus’ answer.  We don’t know whether Jesus chose to remain silent or Pilate had no patience to listen. Nineteen centuries later, the Russian novelist Mikhail Bulgakov extracted an answer from Jesus.  “The truth is,” tells Jesus to Pilate, “first of all, that your head aches, and aches so badly that you’re having faint-hearted thoughts of death.  You’re not only unable to speak to me, but it is even hard for you to look at me.  And I am now your unwilling torturer, which upsets me.  You can’t even think about anything and only dream that your dog should come, apparently the one being you are attached to.  But your suffering will soon be over, your headache will go away.” [ The Master and Margarita , Penguin Classics, 2007, p.24] Bulgakov’s Jesus goes on to advise Pilate that he would do well to go for a stroll, maybe in the gardens on the Mount of Olives.  “The trou

“The Antichrist can be born from piety itself, from excessive love of God or of the truth…” That’s one of the concluding lines in Umberto Eco’s fabulous novel, The Name of the Rose . I’m celebrating the 30 th anniversary of the publication of the English translation of the novel.  The original Italian version was published in 1980. The novel is set in a Christian monastery in Italy in the early 14 th century.  The plot unfolds in seven days in the year 1327 though the background will span many years earlier. Those were the years in which many people were burnt as heretics and witches by the Catholic Church, the most powerful religion of those days. Eco’s novel illustrates in its own subtle way how a very innocent woman was burnt as a witch simply because she had to sell her body to two monks in the monastery in return for the food she could take home for people at home.  The monks in question are tortured as heretics, and they are not innocent anyway.  The inqu