Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Book Review Title: The Story of a Suicide Author: Sriram Ayer Innocence is short-lived. Unless you are equipped with the skills demanded by the prevalent social environment, you are doomed to fail in life.  This is the basic message of Sriram Ayer’s novel, The Story of a Suicide , published online and made available here . The novel tackles very important themes of contemporary relevance: individual liberty, women’s rights, homosexuality, potential hazards of electronic gadgets and the misuse of social media.  Moreover, the novel delves into the meaning and purpose of life as best as pop fiction can.    The novel tells the story of  four students who come together in a college and become friends. Charu, the only girl among them, is the only heroic character.  The male characters are either innocent and homosexual or wicked altogether.  Can homosexuality be triggered by innocence?  Can it be triggered by the trauma of a childhood experience?  These are some of the ques

Civilisation is an attitude.  It is a sophistication of the mind.  Very few people acquire such sophistication.  The vast majority remain as barbarian as the ancient savage was.  There may be one difference, however. While the ancient savages inflicted physical violence on real enemies, today’s savages tend to assault the individual’s self-confidence psychologically projecting the individual as a perceived enemy.  Physical violence has not vanished altogether.  Most terrorist attacks are physical annihilations.  Attacks on the Dalits and Muslims in India by the so-called vigilantes are often both physical and psychological.  Tying up people and lashing their buttocks before a crowd is more a psychological attack than physical. So is urinating on someone’s face or forcing someone to eat cow-dung.      PM Modi has publicly admitted that 4 out of 5 of these vigilantes are criminals taking advantage of the situation.  RSS has taken exception to the PM’s statistics.  It may be

Roads hold out fascinating promises. They beckon us to the mystery that lies beyond the bend.  Here are some of those roads that added charm to some of my best years. All the pictures are from South Delhi. I rode a two-wheeler on these roads for many years humming to myself John Denver’s famous lines: “Country roads, take me home / To the place I belong.”  Not that I wanted to belong anywhere particularly.  Not that I was philosophical enough to suffer from rootlessness.  Rootlessness is the natural destiny of anyone who is delighted by roads even if he is not a Diogenes. Roads promise to lead you to somewhere beyond the horizon that circumscribes you.  That’s the charm of roads.  Hope is what roads are composed of.  Hope is an illusion insofar as it lies beyond the horizon.  What is life without those beloved illusions?  I love Mark Twain's dictum: "Don't part with your illusions.  When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live." A v