Tomichan Matheikal's blog

 Some days are very uninspiring. Today is one such. The school closed yesterday for a week of Onam holidays. Brownie's little kittens kept me entertained this morning. They are 32 days old, just the time they get restless. They move out at the very first opportunity and their mother, Brownie, goes after them to bring them back, one by one, taking them rather laboriously by the scruff of their neck. They don't stay in, however. Brownie becomes impatient and growls. I opt to help her by carrying all the four together to their bed and closing the door of the room. They rush to the door and register their protests loud enough. After that, they go to sleep.  I wish to bring some pics of my kittens and cats. At present there are seven of them at home: 3 adults and 4 young ones. These young ones will leave us soon. One is already booked.  Brownie's kittens Brownie and Bobby Bobby is also Brownie's son but from the previous litter. His favourite hobby is to prevent me from read...

Landslide near my village - image from The Hindu Five members of a family were washed away along with their house the other day just a few kilometres from my village. Such incidents caused by unprecedented landslides are becoming frequent in Kerala. They are some of the consequences of climate change which is itself caused by what we have done to our planet. They are happening not only in Kerala. They happen all over the world. More than half a century ago scientists warned humanity about an imminent disaster called climate change . In the 1980s many solutions were suggested by concerned scholars and scientists. Lester Brown, one of them, defined sustainability as development that meets our needs without compromising the ability of the future generations to meet their needs. Forty years after the world applauded Brown’s theory, the world stands in much poorer shape today. We don’t put theories into practice; we only clap for them. It is getting late now. We need to start acting...

  Fiction Angel woke up a little later than usual that morning. It was drizzling outside and that gave him a convenient excuse for pulling the blanket over himself once again. He should have been tapping the rubber trees. A little drizzle didn’t matter because the rubber trees had been given plastic skirts precisely to let the tapping go on irrespective of the weather. Moreover, Angel was supposed to be a good young man doing everything sincerely like the angels. Angel was not his real name. He got that name after he played the role of an angel in a play directed by Father Joseph, the parish priest. Not only the people of the parish but also Father Joseph thought that the young man was as good as an angel. Well, almost. Angels are as good as God, according to Father Joseph. Not as perfect or omnipotent or omniscient. As good . Goodness is innocence. Angels have absolute faith in God because of their innocence. They don’t doubt or question God’s ways. Some angels did doubt. T...

Can you impose a language on the birds? Can you make the pigeons in Delhi coo in Hindi, for example? Will they arrest the pigeons as antinational creatures for refusing to coo in Hindi? In ‘The Last Lesson’, a short story written by French writer Alphonse Daudet [1840-1897], the protagonist, a very young student in a French school, wonders whether the Germans will make the pigeons sing in German since his province of Alsace has been conquered by Bismarck. One of the very first things that conquerors do is to impose their culture and language on the new subjects. The conquest is complete only when the subjects give up their own idols and embrace the new ones. The imposed ones. One of the reasons why I never learnt Hindi properly though I lived in North India for the most part of my life is that I had wings. I was a pigeon that knew only one language. Coo. Coo-coo. Coo coo coo. Can you take away that language? You can take away my food. You can take away my dress. You can take ...

  I had just been two years into my career as a teacher when Salman Rushdie’s most controversial novel, The Satanic Verses , was published. Now 34 years later, two years after my official retirement from the job, Rushdie has been punished savagely for writing that book. Punished by a person who never read the book. The punishment was ordered by a religious leader who, I’m sure, had also not cared to read the book. Ignorance and hatred are the fundamental driving forces of popular religion. The Satanic Verses explores faith and doubt with a kind of ingenuity that only Rushdie possessed. The novel looked at the validity of divine revelation and scriptures with incisive humour as well as irrepressible agony of the soul. It makes use of dream sequences and fantasy and melodrama to tell the story of Gibreel Farishta, a Bollywood movie star with a conflicted soul torn between faith and doubt. There are a few equally captivating characters in the novel like Saladin Chamcha, a voice a...