Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Romanticism is good in poetry but can be fatal in real life.  “The lot of the man who sees life truly and thinks about it romantically is Despair,” says Bernard Shaw [Preface to Caesar and Cleopatra ].  Some of the finest poets in the history of English literature met their end in the prime of their life.  Will Durant argued that they were killed by their romanticism.  Shaw wouldn’t have disagreed. Today’s Hindu newspaper reports that “Sixty years after death, Stalin (is) turning hero for Russians.”  Celebrating the 60 th anniversary of Stalin’s death, “a majority of Russians” expressed the view that “the Soviet dictator had played a positive role in Soviet history.”  The report goes on to say that “The number of people who called Stalin the most outstanding historical figure jumped from 12 per cent shortly before the fall of the Soviet Union to 36 per cent in 2008.”  And now 49% of Russians view Stalin as a great hero “even though they are ...

“The Ancient Egyptians built the pyramids when Germans were living in caves.  Arabs ruled the world in the Middle Ages – the Muslims were doing algebra when Germans princes could not write their own names…. Civilizations rise and fall…”  One of Ken Follett’s characters says that in The Winter of the World . We may like to think we are more civilised than our forefathers.  One of the many illusions under which quite many people labour is that human civilisation improves with each passing day.  The person speaking through his mobile phone with another who is sitting thousands of miles away is more civilised than the one who communicated sitting in a jungle with the help of the signals beaten on a drum.  Is he really? Historians and scholars like Prof Felipe Fernandez-Armesto will not agree.  The professor says that “Societies do not evolve: they just change” [ Civilizations ].  The change need not be for the better. Consider the follow...

  “The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”   The realization dawned upon the Biblical God pretty early (Genesis 6: 5).   It didn’t take too many generations down from Adam and Eve for God to come to the regret that “he had made man on the earth” (6: 6).    So God decided to “blot out man whom I have created from the face of the ground, man and beast and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.”   Gods are not known for rationality, whatever their religion.   The Biblical God is as whimsical as any counterpart of his.   Having condemned the creatures as unworthy of existence and fit only to be drowned in a deluge, God decides to save Noah and his family as well as “seven pairs of all clean animals, the male and his mate; and a pair of the animals that are not clean, the male and his mate; and seven pai...

Short story Shilavati was bored.   She had everything she wanted.   A huge LED screen with more than 200 TV channels and a resounding Dolby sound system filled the vacuum of her days with light and sound.   There were manservants and maidservants waiting for her orders to fill the emptiness in her ego with a glass of fruit juice or a ride to the shopping mall.   Yet she felt bored.   Her two children were at school and husband was in the office of the MNC which paid him more money than they really needed.   The family used to go for an outing almost every weekend.   Yet she felt bored.   She switched the channels on the TV. The English news channel was discussing whether death penalty fitted in with contemporary civilisation.   Within months of becoming the President, Mr Pranab Mukherjee had sent two persons to the gallows and dismissed the mercy petitions of the killers of Rajiv Gandhi. Why is there so much brouhaha about executing s...

Author: Ken Follett Publisher: Penguin, 2012        Pages: 940 Price: Rs399 Ken Follett is a master of epic tales.  He has woven mesmerising stories with wide arrays of memorable characters who are the warp and weft of the fabric of history.  They are characters who either shape the history or are shaped by it.  They are masters or victims.  But they are never puppets dangling from the mechanical fingers of some robotic history.  They are the normal human beings, partly good and partly evil, some strong and others weak, some of whom dare while others cower. Winter of the World differs from those novels, however.  Its characters are more puppets dangling from the warp and weft of history.  The real persons who shape and manipulate the history are Hitler and Stalin.  Yet they hardly appear in the novel; they work like invisible gods through their agents, the Gestapo and the NKVD, both of whi...