Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Fiction I had just finished reading Ponkunnam Varkey’s short story about a priest, his sexton and their sex lives when the TV news registered the address of Bishop Franco for sexual offences against a nun. The bishop was in news for quite some time and so his arrest did not come as a tremor to me though later I learnt that it was incredible to many Catholics in Kerala. “What is incredible?” My friend Tom asked me. He is a blogger with quite some conceit. His conceit had attracted the attention of the Catholic clergy time and again in the past though of late they seemed to have given him up probably as a hopeless case. I don’t like his conceit either. But I tolerate it because I’m more conceited than him according to my wife. Long before the arrest of the bishop, Tom had written a blog about him titled Why Franco Mulakkal should be a saint . When I questioned his prejudiced condemnation of the bishop as well as the Church, he suggested Ponkunnam Varkey’s story to me. Ther...

The nation is gearing up to celebrate the 150 th birthday of Mahatma Gandhi with an array of year-long programmes. Undoubtedly the great soul deserves the celebration. Gandhi was one of the greatest souls that ever walked on the earth. India has been converted into a quagmire that inevitably submerges any Gandhian value or principle that dares to make its presence palpable. Gandhi was religious but genuinely so. For him religion was a tool to make himself a better human being day after day. It was his spiritual sustenance. It helped him see other human beings as sparks of the divine. It enabled him to love every person as his brother or sister. He had no enemies. Even the British were not his enemies, as he declared time and again. Religion would never make Gandhi sectarian; on the contrary, it gifted him with universal love. Truth was the foundation of Gandhi’s morality. Every genuine life is an endless quest after truth and Gandhi’s life was nothing else. He experimented...

Add caption “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel,” said Maya Angelou. Making people feel good is an art. I confess I don’t possess it. Not that I didn’t try to learn it. It just doesn’t come to me naturally. So I chose the next best option: stay silent when you don’t know what to say and just give as sweet a smile as you can. A smile makes people feel good. My Christian upbringing and the Malayali cultural background have much to do with my inability to make people feel good. Neither Christianity [the version I was taught or learnt] nor the memes I was condemned with congenitally ever made anyone feel good about anything. Life is evil, according to Christianity. We are born evil with the original sin. And then came the typical Malayali cynicism which added colours and nuances to the original sin. Wait. It’s not all that negative. Don’t judge yet. My best friends are my s...

In the former half of 2000s I suggested a topic for an inter-school declamation competition. I was teaching at Sawan Public School, Delhi at that time and the competition was an annual event. More than 30 schools from different states of North India participated. My suggestion was: “Success without character is hollow.” It was an adaptation of a quote from Albert Einstein: “Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.” My suggestion elicited a few dissenting murmurs. “Is success possible without some compromises?” A senior faculty member asked me. The others desisted from articulating their dissent. For some reason the Principal nodded his assent and as was the practice the topic was displayed on the stage of the auditorium where the competition was to be held. You can see it in the picture below. It was an interesting competition with more than 30 brilliant young speakers from some elite schools of the region trying to enlighten a few...

One of the communities I like and follow on Facebook is Beef Janata Party . Though its sidebar proclaims “Just for Fun”, it isn’t fun at all. It is a consistent, devoted and knowledgeable resistance to what the Right wing in India is doing. It has a good share of friends and followers: 270,149 people like the community and 273,606 follow it. The comments that appear below their posts show that there is a sizeable section of people in India who are frustrated with Narendra Modi’s governance. Beef Janata Party does not launch cheap attacks on anyone. They are serious about their mission which ostensibly is to make people aware of the mendacity and duplicity of the Right wing in the country. It questions all forms of falsehood, chicanery and assaults on citizens. It mocks silly claims made by the so-called Modi bhakts. Beef Janata Party has a mission and a vision. It is a concerted effort to cleanse the political atmosphere in the country of hatred and malice. It exposes falseh...