Tomichan Matheikal's blog

  Outside a church in Kerala Philosopher Spinoza identified three ethical systems that human beings generally tend to follow. One of them centres on the heart, the second on passion for power, and the third on the brain. The first is the way of the saints and religious people. Jesus and the Buddha, Mahatma Gandhi and Mother Teresa followed this path of the heart. These people consider everyone as equally precious, resist evil by returning good, identify virtue with love , and inclines to total democracy in politics. Conquerors and dictators follow their passion for power. From Alexander the Great to Narendra Modi (whose greatness has apparently been acknowledged by quite a few million people of India), many people who were perceived as “strong” leaders or rulers belong to this category. Spinoza argued that for these rulers some people are superior to others. They don’t care two hoots about equality and such stuff. They relish the risks of combat, conquest, and rule. They iden...

  Book Review Title: The Shadow of the Wind Author: Carlos Ruiz Zafon Publisher: Phoenix, 2004 Pages: 510   Some plots are too perfect to be credible. But they keep the reader hooked to the last. Add some mysteries and complexities, the novel becomes a terrible whirlpool that draws your very soul in. Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind is one such novel. The novel is about memories and vendettas, love struggling against hate, virtue struggling to survive in a world of evil. Originally written in Spanish, the novel is set in the post-civil war Barcelona. But the pre-war Barcelona keeps coming up throughout the plot. In fact, the plot moves like two intertwined serpents that are inseparable. The past is resurrected at every turn on the present road, that too with a new vengeance. There is poison all along. There is blood spilt at some places. There is more darkness than light. Is it evil that makes this world so dark? ‘Not evil,’ says Fermin, one of the chi...

  What makes life really worthwhile is learning. The best remedy for sadness is to learn something, as a character in T H White’s The Once and Future King says. “You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics…” The character goes on. Base minds will tread upon your honour. Small minds will divide your people into we and they. Then they will be made to wage mindless wars. The world is a bad, sad place. There is only one remedy: to learn. “Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust…” I have been a teacher throughout my working life. Now that I stand at the fag end of that career, I am happy to note that the feedback has always been highly supportive. My students have given me (and continue to do so) enough...

  One of the many allegations I face occasionally, after Mr Modi became the PM, is that I hate Hindus or Hinduism or both. This allegation was hurled at me yet again yesterday on Facebook by a person who worked with me for a couple of months in the same school where I taught in Delhi. It began with a 4-year-old blog post of mine in which I argued that the RSS view of Onam, which is the same as the North Indian view, will never be acceptable to Malayalis for whom the Asura Maveli, rather than the god-incarnate Vamana, is the real hero for obvious reasons. The above-mentioned friend first questioned my knowledge of Hindu scriptures because he, like most others of the fold, thinks that a non-Hindu does not care to study Hinduism. When he realised that I had perhaps more knowledge about Hindu scriptures than himself, he changed his charge against me. He said I refused to accept his good intention. When I questioned his intention, he changed his allegation again: I lacked “the purity...

An old tree in my village When I was in my late twenties I used to long for death. I didn’t want to go on beyond my thirties at least. Middle aged people were the greatest bores I had ever come across and I didn’t want to reach that stage. Moreover, I worked as a schoolteacher in Shillong in those days. The remuneration was a pittance whose lion’s share disappeared as house rent right at the beginning of the month. The end of the month would usually demand some tightening of the belt. Not a very charming existence even without the boredom added by the middle-aged moralists of various hues. My middle age turned out to be the best period of my life, however. Life proffers interesting ironies. I landed in Delhi at the age of 41 with nothing more than some meagre savings and an attenuated willingness to experiment with life. The job I received at a residential school in Delhi had the charms of a Homeric Siren: at once enchanting and enslaving. The enslavement was as much a delight...