Tomichan Matheikal's blog

  You can kill a mad dog, but you shouldn’t kill an innocent songbird. Morality isn’t a set of absolute do’s and don’ts. Genuine morality is the goodness of your heart. That goodness is more often than not a product of right upbringing. Atticus Finch of Harper Lee’s celebrated novel, To Kill a Mockingbird , is an ideal father who brings up his two children teaching them the most essential lessons of human life. Scout and Jem are innocent at the beginning of the story. They will, and have to, lose their innocence as the plot develops. Yet they will retain their human goodness because their father has given them the right education. Most human beings carry in their hearts a lot of prejudice and ignorance, hate and hypocrisy. That’s why the world is such a foul place where innocent songbirds get killed for no reason and mad dogs rule the roost. You can and should keep your conscience clean if you want to add to the little goodness that remains in humankind. “The one thing that d...

Nah, it isn’t at all as you say. You taught me that honesty is the best policy and truth will prevail in the end. But at the age of 60, I know much better. I have seen crooks and frauds climbing higher and higher on the rungs of sheer dishonesty and ruthless manipulation. You know what: you can kill a few thousand people and yet appear like a saint or even a god-incarnate provided you have an efficient PRO. Life’s as simple as that: a good PRO. You don’t even have to have any public relationships. Your office will do all that. You need other skills and you know what they are; they have nothing to do with all those great values and principles you corrupted me with in the name of god and other nonsense. Gods are the best jokes. They claim to love and then get millions killed. They literally suck, man. I think more crimes are committed in their names than for anything else. Look at the representatives of gods around us: yogis, sadhvis, bishops and cardinals, mullas and maulavis… If th...

  When I was a kid I was taught that God was a mystery. God’s mysteriousness was the ultimate answer to all questions which had otherwise no sensible answers. Why did God create the graceful deer and at the same time the murderous tiger? Answer: God’s ways are inscrutable, boy. I grew up and found it impossible to accept that answer. Like William Blake, I was buffeted time and again by the question whether the same god created both the tiger and the lamb. “What immortal hand or eye / Could frame (the tiger’s) fearful symmetry?” “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” The poet sees God in the lamb too. “He (God) is called by thy name,” the poet tells the lamb. “He is meek and he is mild.” Who is the real god now? The fearful symmetry of the tiger or the gentle meekness of the lamb: which is the real face of god? Are the terrorists who keep killing ordinary people in the name of certain gods the real men of god? Is the boy who chopped off the head of his teacher for the sake ...

  Image from India Today “Between us and reality are our feelings .” Svetlana Alexievich We won’t want to remember Phulmoni Dasi. She was a little girl of 10 when she was married to 30-year-old Hari Mohan Maiti. She died in the night of her marriage as her husband attained the bliss of orgasm which is a man’s right and privilege according to our great custom and tradition. Our glorified ancient culture which insisted that the wife’s virginity should be proved in the “first night” itself. The blood of her broken hymen should stain the bedsheet. But the British government in India at that time did not accept that as any greatness. Hari Mohan was charged with “causing grievous hurt by act endangering life or personal safety of others” and was sentenced to 12 months of hard labour. Within 6 months of that incident, on 9 Jan 1891, the Viceroy of India, Lord Lansdowne presented a bill before the Council of India seeking to amend a relevant section of the Indian Penal Code. Consequent...

  How reliable are our memories? Not much, as a source of objective truths. Memories do play a vital role in our lives for various reasons. But if you think your memories are the true records of what really happened in the past, you are mistaken. “Remembering is not a passionate or dispassionate retelling of a reality that is no more, but a new birth of the past,” says Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich in her book, The Unwomanly Face of War . Memory doesn’t merely remember what actually happened but re-creates it. The narrator of Julian Barnes’s novel, The Sense of an Ending , says rightly that what we end up remembering isn’t always the same as what we have witnessed. We add colours and patterns in order to make painful realities more acceptable. We “adjust, embellish, make sly cuts,” as Barnes puts it. We don’t do it consciously. We are not being villains by adjusting, embellishing, and making those sly cuts. On the contrary, we are doing our best to make sense of what has h...