Tomichan Matheikal's blog

A few days back, a college near my home witnessed an odd kind of disturbance on the campus. Some Muslim students, particularly girls, demanded a separate prayer room for them. The college authorities refused to consent. The college which was established more than 70 years ago belongs to a Christian management. Though the management is Christian, the college is entirely secular in its workings. Students belonging to all religious communities in the state, particularly Hindus, Christians and Muslims, have studied (and still do) in this college for over seven decades without letting their religion interfere with their academic pursuits. The recent face-off led by students of a particular religious community doesn’t augur well for a state with a high population of all the three major religions: Hindus (55%), Muslims (27%) and Christians (18%). The controversy could have become a cauldron of sectarian savagery in many other parts of the country. In Kerala, however, the Muslim leaders of...

AI-generated illustration The parish priest of my neighbourhood committed suicide this morning. His body was found hanging from the ceiling. Just a week back a Catholic nun chose to end her life in the same manner at a place about 20 km from my home. In a country where about 500 persons choose death every day, the suicide of two individuals may not create ripples, let alone waves. But, non-believer as I am, I was shaken by these deaths. Christianity is a religion that accepts suffering as a virtue. In fact, the more the suffering in your life, the better a Christian you can be. Follow the path shown by Jesus, that’s what every priest preaches from the pulpit day after day. Jesus’ path is the way of the cross. I grew up in an extremely conservative Catholic family in an equally conservative village in Kerala. I had a rather wretched childhood. But I was taught to find consolation in the sufferings of Jesus. The Passion of Jesus, that’s what it is called in Catholic theology. Tha...

AI-generated illustration I always believed that generation gap wouldn’t be a problem for me because I had failed to grow up psychologically. My hairs greyed and my skin has begun to show some wrinkles. But I can climb up the stairs with greater ease than a teenager of today. I can challenge my young students to go on a trek in the mountains and I’m sure I’ll conquer greater heights than them with much ease. More importantly, I can smile more sweetly than them. I am more open to new ideas, my blood boils at injustices unlike theirs, I have dreams, ideals and principles… I was condemned to go back to the classroom. It’s for a short while, of course. I’m substituting someone. Initially I was excited. I thought I was getting an opportunity to be young once again. But the actual classrooms have all been terrible disappointments. The teenagers in front of me look so senile, behave like grumpy octogenarians who yawn all the way from morning to evening unable to understand or appreciate a...

  Introduction : The roots of this absurd fiction lie in a Malayalam poem titled Apple and Newton : an absurd poem , written by Veeraankutty in Mathrubhumi weekly dated 28 July 2024. When the apple fell, it was the theory of gravitation that actually fell on Isaac Newton’s head. Or was it Newton that fell into the theory? Nothing is absolutely certain when we come to Newton’s and such people’s levels of thinking. That uncertainty was discovered much later, of course, by Werner Heisenberg. A little before Heisenberg discovered the uncertainty of science, Albert Einstein won nothing less than the Nobel Prize for his Relativity Theory. Newton’s laws of motion were not absolute, Einstein told us. For example, they don’t apply to love. It was Einstein who declared that “Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.” Most probably it was not just any ordinary apple that fell on Newton’s head. There was no apple tree anywhere in the vicinity, in the first place. The app...

  Kingini and Plato have no aesthetic sense. They are killers by instinct, I think. Sadistic too. They catch the prey and play with it until it is rendered lifeless. Once the prey is dead, Kingini and Plato will abandon it and go in search of another victim.  Kingini and Plato are my cats. Mother and son, both together have driven quite a few creatures here to extinction, I think. Lizards and chameleons are their usual victims. The cicadas have fallen silent in the bushes. Once in a while Kingini and Plato discover a small snake too to play with. Highly venomous ones! What worries me these days is their newfound fondness for butterflies. They have become experts in catching butterflies. They just sit and watch a butterfly for a while and then one jump - the butterrfly will be in their mouth. By the time I rush to save the little creature, it is usually too late. Most of the time I don't see these hunts. I see only the dead remains of the tiny beauties.  Nature is full of ...