Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Historical Fiction I will soon be thrown into the mass grave along with the naked corpses of the other soldiers.  I am Colonel Chabert, not just an ordinary soldier, Colonel Chabert who led a whole regiment of soldiers to many a victory for none other than Napoleon himself.  I have been famous when the blood still ran in my veins reddening my cheeks with the zest for conquests.  But now I am no more than a body going to be thrown into a mass grave with very ordinary bodies.  The Battle of Eylau Death makes you a mere body.  All bodies are equal and ordinary.  What makes you different is life, your life.  My last battle was the toughest.  The Battle of Eylau.  Our brave French soldiers met the equally brave Russian soldiers in the most inclement of weathers in Arctic conditions.  The fatal wound I received runs from the nape of my neck to just above my right eye.  You can still see it.  My blood stopped running...

"Acting wholeheartedly with wisdom means appreciating the relationships and interactions between ourselves and others," say Joseph O'Connor and John Seymour in their book on NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming).  (The above illustration is taken from that book.)  You can't really conquer peaks of success all alone simply because everything around you is linked to you.  With an invisible string.   When you think you are conquering the peak alone, with no rival beneath you because the sole rival in sight is about to fall off, remember that his fall may mean your fall too.   Why do people actually want to push others down to the bottom?   Helplessness, I think.  Inability to manage others.  Sheer inability.   Weakness makes us aggressive? But is it only weakness?  Can aggression be fun? I was watching a young boy playing a race game on computer.  Whenever he came across a rival in the game he would do ...

Riding around in Delhi on a rickety scooter is one of my few hobbies.  It gives me a feel of earthiness, a feeling that I am a nobody amidst the costly cars that fly by me.  It makes me feel humble, arrogant as I am.  It helps me to check my dreams.  It roots me in reality, the harsh reality that I like to confront honestly. A traffic policeman stopped me today.  I took off my helmet with a smile that comes rather artificially to me these days. “I’ve broken the law, you can punish me,” I said.  I think the smile had not vanished from my cheeks.   I had jumped a red light.  I had not intended it.  My scooter got stuck on the gravel and the lights turned red before I could cross the range.  This was the first time that I was ever caught in my 12 years of hobbying in Delhi by the omnipresent traffic police of Delhi.  “License?” asked the policeman. I handed him my licence. “... school ...,” he read it ...

Historical Fiction “I’m going to die,” declared Diogenes.  He was 96.  By the time you reach the age of 96 you will have acquired the wisdom to know when to die.  You can have such wisdom even earlier.  Depends on what life taught you.  Rather what you cared to learn from life. Diogenes was on a street in Corinth.  Dying.  The street was his home.  When the weather was too good outside he chose to get into a barrel.  Somebody had gifted him that barrel.  Why somebody?  Greece was mad enough to understand the madness of Diogenes and appreciate it.  But Greece was not so mad that Diogenes was prompted to declare with the certainty that comes only to godmen that “Most men are within a finger’s breadth of being mad.” “It takes a wise man to discover a wise man,” declared Diogenes with the same godman-certainty when Xeniades of Corinth bought him from the slave dump.  He had been sold as a slave by one o...

Fiction “MY prayer for today,” he would begin the morning assembly every day with those words. My, I, mine – his vocabulary went little beyond that. “My school,” he was referring to his previous school which was supposed to have some fame because it was situated within a dead king’s renovated fort. And his new school had a living wall, a wall that he constantly built anew by raising its height.  He never felt secure outside a dead king’s fort. “Why did he become a Principal?”  Wondered Manmohan, an average teacher with average brains. “Dead kings’ forts stimulate royal ambitions,” consoled Mrs Manmohan, an average teacher with average brains. The Principal’s favourite team lost the cricket match.  The Principal was furious.  “How can MY team lose?”  He thundered. He galloped towards his car, pulled the door open, sat in the driver’s seat and drove the car backward.  As far as the backward ride was possible. Then he fe...