Tomichan Matheikal's blog

  From agropedia India has seldom been generous towards its womenfolk. In 1990 Amartya Sen spoke about the scandalising number of missing women in India because of the Indian preference for male children. Soon researchers estimated that more than 65 million women were missing from the country’s population. In such a country where women are not even allowed to be born, or not allowed to grow up after birth, what is women’s status in electoral politics? The first answer is that the political system is skewed in favour of men if only because the absence of 65 million voters translates as 20 percent of the country’s missing electorate. The situation has continued to be worrisome for years. Last year UNFPA’s State of the World Population report said that one in three girls missing globally due to sex selection, both pre- and post-natal, is from India. That’s tragically ironic for a country which creates new slogans for women’s security year after year. What comes as a consolation...

  Some days have begun to look utterly washed out. When the current pandemic broke out, there was the hope that it would be brought under control soon. Our medical science is so advanced, isn’t it? When the first wave gave way to the second, I hoped it was sort of an anticlimax, one of those many cruel jokes that life loves to play and jokes don’t last long. But it hasn’t ended with the second wave either. Life is slipping out like the effluence from a drab industry. The weekend travels came to an end long ago. Too many books and too much TV have begun to taste sour. The online classes are threatening to get into a mundane rut. The mind refuses to think sometimes. Dreams died a pretty while ago without even leaving traces. It’s then someone from the parish church called on Sunday, as part of a survey, to ask what my opinion was about rebuilding the chapel [ kurisupalli ] of the parish. I didn’t want to be asked such opinions since I hardly associate myself with religions. I...

Mosquitoes live long. They were around in the Jurassic era sucking the blood of dinosaurs. The wretched dinosaurs eventually vanished but mosquitoes flourished. Now we have more than 3000 species of them with us in spite of all the poison we carry in our blood which they feed on. It seems all our jingoism and bingoism are like Boost, the secret of mosquito’s energy. We shouldn’t tarnish the history of the entire species, however, though reshaping history has become our main national pastime these days. It is the female of the species that is deadly. The male mosquitoes are vegetarians feeding only on plant juices such as nectar. The females not only suck our blood but also urinate on us after sucking the blood. Science tells us that it is their way of purifying the blood they have sucked. No wonder our jingoism doesn’t poison them. You will never come across a Hindu mosquito or a Muslim one or whatever. They don’t have slogans and mottos to kill for. They just suck blood. Our polit...

  Imagine a statue of Nathuram Godse welcoming tourists to Mahatma Gandhi’s Sabarmati Ashram in Gujarat. What is being planned for Sabarmati by Narendra Modi is quite as bewildering as that. Having killed the soul of Jallianwala Bagh with the renovation of the historical site, Modi, with the Chief Minister of Gujarat, is all set to convert Gandhi’s Ashram into an Indian version of Disneyland. A sum of Rs 1200 crore has been set aside for the project. Apart from modernised museums and a modified amphitheatre, the Ashram will now have food courts and shopping complexes besides a parking space for 200 cars. Mahatma Gandhi’s statue in a prominent public place in Ahmedabad, sculpted by none less than Kanti Patel, will be transferred to the new Sabarmati. That’s a clever strategy for reducing the visibility of the statue! The sparrows and squirrels that now share space with human beings will vanish with their habitat-trees. Human beings were already dispossessed of their lands for...

  Yesterday I presented in this space one of Maggie's students whose project work deserved a wider visibility. Let me present one more student from the same grade who paid a poetic tribute to Evelyn Glennie after learning a lesson about the musician.  Evelyn Glennie carried music in her body. She has been profoundly deaf since the age of 12. Now she is 56. She learnt to play musical instruments after she became deaf. She says that she taught herself to listen with parts of her body instead of ears. She gives over 100 concerts a year. She enthralls thousands of people with her breathtaking performance with various instruments. She teaches music. Recently she was also named as the Chancellor of Robert Gordon University in Scotland, her country.  Irene Sara Sam Irene Sara Sam, a grade 9 student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala chose to pay a poetic tribute to Evelyn for her project in English. It is her teacher who drew my attention to the work so well-composed an...