Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Book Review Title: The Swaraj Spy Author: Vijay Balan Publisher: HarperCollins, 2022 Hundreds of thousands of people sacrificed their lives during the struggle for the country’s independence. Each one of them must have had a moving story to narrate. Most of them vanished from history, however, without telling their stories to anyone. Vijay Balan tells the story of one such person in this debut novel of his. The Swaraj Spy is the story of a real person, Kumaran Nair from Calicut (today’s Kozhikode) in Kerala. The plot spans the period from 1931 when Kumar (as the protagonist is called usually) gets chucked from the Malabar Special Police (MSP) to 1943 when his life reaches a tragic denouement. Bhagat Singh had just been executed. There were protests all over the country. It was one such protest gathering that Jemadar Kumaran Nair was asked to disperse by Commandant H Keane. “No! I can’t do this,” Kumar tells himself. “I wasn’t trained to break the skulls of unarmed women!...

The ancient Greek statues of heroes all have small penises. It is not because the men actually had small packages. It is because the Greeks didn’t value sex much. Rather, they valued the qualities of the mind more. It is interesting to note that the Greeks endowed their enemies and other villainous or foolish characters with large appendages. One study says that “having a smaller package was considered a sign of virtue, of civility, or self-control or discipline” in Greece. The perspective has changed significantly today. If small penises and big brains was the old perspective, the reverse is today’s. I remembered the small organs of the Greek heroes when I read this morning a Deccan Herald report titled Surprise school bag checks yield condoms, cigarettes in Bengaluru . The checks were carried out in classes 8 to 10. It is quite disturbing to read that contraceptive pills were found in the bags of class 8 girls. After the protracted Covid lockdown with its online classes, m...

  Image from here If you feel that you belong to the whole human race rather than a particular nation or religion or any such relatively smaller community, you have a more evolved consciousness. Nationalists, religious bigots and terrorists, linguistic chauvinists and such people possess a low-level consciousness. There is something called ‘terror management theory’ in psychology. It says that when people are made to feel insecure and anxious they tend to cling to narrow affiliations. Remember how the slogan Hindu khatre mein hai captured the psyche of a whole nation a few years back? The Hindu is in danger. What danger? In a country where the Hindus were what is today commonly and significantly labelled as “brutal majority," what danger did they face from the tiny minority? It was a danger fabricated by certain clever politicians for the sake of winning elections. They won too. They rule the country today. And they keep the whole country at a very low level of consciousness....

  These are busy days for me and that's the reason for the irregularity of my presence here. What keeps me busy is the state level cultural competition of CBSE being held in my school. The event started yesterday and will go on till Sunday. About 7000 students from 1400 CBSE schools of Kerala are here on the campus of my school participating in events like singing and dancing and acting being held on 21 venues . These are all winners from their respective zones. The purpose of this Kalotsav is the all-round development of the students of CBSE schools. It is based on the conviction that every student is a precious individual with immense potential. Events like this seek to provide the students with a hierarchy of platforms where their potential can be materialized, skills honed, and personality unfolded to its ultimate fulfilment. Education is not all about textbooks and the labs. In fact, there is more that should happen outside the classrooms. The writer and the musician and the ...

Sunday meditation “Didn’t you cut open the womb of a woman and eat the foetus?” It was Kadammanitta Ramakrishnan, a celebrated Malayalam poet, who put that blunt question to a Gujarati trader who was travelling with him on a train. Kadammanitta was returning to Kerala after a visit to the post-Godhra Gujarat. The poet had seen the agonies of thousands of people living in Gujarat’s refugee camps and heard their heart-rending stories. The Gujarati trader on the train had asked the poet a question: “Are you a non-vegetarian?” “I’m not very particular about food,” Kadammanitta answered. “What about you?” The Gujarati’s brag was: “I’m a Vaishnavite. We are pure vegetarians.” It was then the poet asked him the question about eating the foetus. Later Kadammanitta composed a couple of poems on what he had seen in Gujarat of 2002. One of them was about a group of pure-vegetarian Vaishnavites setting fire to a banyan tree under which a boy named Kamrem Alam had taken shelter. The boy became ...