Tomichan Matheikal's blog

While my car was getting serviced, I walked into a multiplex this morning in order to while away the three hours demanded by the service provider.   My wife suggested watching a movie and the ticket was available for the Malayalam movie, Godha .   Godha is just an average movie about the sport of wrestling which is dying in Kerala.   There are a few individuals in a village who still live with nostalgic memories about the wrestling trophies they had won in their youth.   Into their midst walks a young girl, Aditi, from Punjab.   Aditi is a wrestler.   She revives the akhara and brings laurels to the village and the state. There’s a bit of romance to add the necessary spice to the plot.   Anjaneya Das, the protagonist, had gone to Punjab to study where he met Aditi.   It’s that connection which brings Aditi to Das’s village.   While Das is in Punjab he tells a companion about what beef means to the people of Kerala.   “I...

Today’s Malayala Manorama reports that the Madhya Pradesh government paid five hundred rupees each to thousands of people who were brought from the 33 districts of the state to swell the rally held in Amarkhand where PM Modi exercised his rhetorical skills yet another time.   The report goes on to say that the money was taken from the Sachch Bharat funds. BJP is using enormous sums of money for propaganda of all sorts some of which are extremely heinous and remind us of the propaganda techniques employed by Hitler and the methods employed by Mossad.   Now if the Prime Minister will say things he did a few months ago (like: 80% of gau rakshaks are criminals, or ‘kill me instead of attacking the Dalits’), we know it’s only a temporary ploy for placating the current mood.   The Prime Minister along with his Goebbelsian Amit Shah has a clear vision and goal: to make India a Hindu Rashtra.   Eliminating the minority communities and Dalits is part of the...

It is difficult to choose one favourite writer because there are quite a few whom I admire.   However, for the sake of the latest Indispire theme, I pick Nikos Kazantzakis because of his particular relevance in today’s India which is being torn apart into fragments by certain political forces which pretend to have religious motives. Though the Greek Orthodox Church considered excommunicating Kazantzakis for writing the novel The Last Temptation of Christ , the idea was rejected because even his bitter enemies could easily see that Kazantzakis was more spiritual than the religious leaders.   When the clergy was campaigning ferociously for his excommunication, Kazantzakis’s reply was: “You gave me a curse, Holy fathers, I give you a blessing: may your conscience be as clear as mine and may you be as moral and religious as I.” He was not exaggerating.   The tragedy with most religious people is that they don’t explore their religion as deeply as people like Kaz...