Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Photo by Joshi Daniel I love smiles. They make a huge difference to the way people perceive and communicate. A smile can melt the snow that envelopes the indifferent heart. It can douse fires and sprout blooms. I consider myself particularly fortunate because my days begin with a thousand smiles. The way from the parking space to the staffroom of my school is strewn with angelic smiles.    One of the unwritten rules in my class is that everyone should keep a smiling face. Smiles make the classroom almost paradisiacal. Both teaching and learning become fun with all those smiles lighting up the air.    Once a student decided to exhibit her displeasure with me by presenting me the most stoic indifference possible because I had given her less marks in a test than she thought she deserved. My explanation that her answer did not match her potential did not convince her. I waited for her natural beatific smile to return to her naughty cheeks below her dancing e...

Image Courtesy here Though Pranab Mukherjee not-so-subtly denounced the basic tenets of RSS in his speech at the RSS training camp today, his description of the RSS founder Hedgewar as a “great son of Mother India” betrays the ambivalence of the former President’s attitude to the fundamentalist organisation. Is he suffering from senility? Probably yes. Or he may be playing a wily political game at which he was always an expert.    Is Hedgewar great in any way? He founded an organisation on the principle of hatred. Hatred cannot make anyone a “great son of Mother India” unless you subscribe to the right wing policies that have come to dominate Indian politics from 2014.    Hedgewar hated Muslims. That hatred was and still is the raison d'être of RSS. Hedgewar hated Indian National Congress simply because it stood for secular inclusiveness. His hatred of the Congress and what it stood for made him and his organisation a tacit supporter of the British R...

From Indian Express There is no way to rule innocent people, as Ayn Rand said. How do you put any sort of control on innocent people? And ruling is all about putting controls, isn’t it?   “The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals,” said Rand. If there aren’t enough criminals, the government will make them. You declare more and more things as illegal and then it becomes impossible for people to live without breaking laws.    From the time the Modi government came to power in 2014 an endless list of laws has been implemented. A facile taxing system called GST, Real Estate Regulation Act, laws for recovery of debt, insolvency and bankruptcy, linking almost everything under the sun with Aadhar… It’s a formidable list. Then there are the unwritten rules implemented by all sorts of volunteers like the various Senas: what food you can eat and cannot eat, what dress you may wear, who you can marry, which god you can worship, in which ...

Book Review Every person has a story to tell: his/her own. Life is a tale full of sound and fury, as Shakespeare’s Macbeth realised to his sad dismay. How the tale is told makes the difference. Roma Gupta Sinha narrates the story of her life in Destiny’s Favourite Child , whose subtitle ‘An Autobiography of a Rebel’ is what actually drew me to the book. The book is published by The Blogchatter (a community of bloggers) as part of its E-book Carnival . It became obligatory for me to review this book by virtue of the terms and conditions for the authors who participate in the Carnival.    Roma has, no doubt, an engaging story to tell. There is a childhood that struggled with a profusion of cousins in a joint family in which the author’s parents were absent. There was the disquieting stand-offishness between the parents. There is the eventual loss of mother and alienation from father. And so on.    Trauma makes autobiographies fascinating stories but on...

Book Review Sitharaam Jayakumar is a good story teller. His e-book, Eighty Hours to Save Karen , kept me hooked so much so that I read it in one go this morning. It is the story of Air Commodore Mathew Williams’ single-minded efforts to save his granddaughter Karen Lakshmi who has been afflicted with a mysterious illness. Karen is the last member of the family left to him.    The mystery revolves round the few people who lived in Mathew’s house before he bought it in an auction. All those people perished too in rather tragic circumstances some of which were their own making. Their gardener survives to tell their tale. And the gardener has one trick too many up his sleeve.    Mathew lives in Kimnur, a remote village in Himachal Pradesh and the story revolves round his house there though he has to drive to Shimla and fly to Mumbai within the eponymous 80 hours in order to connect the necessary threads in the plot. Finally all the loose ends are brought...