Tomichan Matheikal's blog

S leep eludes me. It happens these days. I can hear missiles roaring in Lebanon, the Promised Land of erstwhile days, the land whose cedar trees built Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem. It could be from Ukraine that the roars came. The Great Terminator of Ukraine is now threatening to use nuclear bombs to ensure his victory. His victory! One man’s victory is the defeat of millions of people. One man makes a lot of difference. There is this one man who is giving an interview to a religious TV channel. A Christian channel, to be precise. He quotes chapters and verses of the Old Testament to prove that the levelling of Gaza is a divine plan, one which was devised by God Himself centuries ago. “Didn’t Yahweh say through Amos that He would send a fire on the wall of Gaza, Amos 1:7?” The devout Christian says with ardent faith in his holy book. “What does Zephania 2:4 say? For Gaza shall be forsaken, and Ashkelon a desolation. They shall drive out Ashdod at the noon and Ekron shall be root...

My champak: view from front yard My Champak tree grows by leaps and bounds. It is now 70+ feet tall in my estimate. When I planted it in 2016, it was a sapling not even half a foot tall. A colleague of mine from school gave it to me on the occasion of Environment Day when the Forest department of the state distributed all sorts of saplings in schools. This colleague had picked up a few saplings one of which was this champak. Then someone told her that champak was an ill omen in homes. So she gave it to me very generously. Since omens don’t intimidate me, I brought it home and planted it right next to my main gate where it is visible to hundreds of people who pass by every day. It is my romantic love for its flowers that prompted me to plant the champak sapling in a prominent place, not any desire to flaunt my daring of superstitions. I’m now grieved to see that the tree is only growing tall day by day and not putting out any bloom. Then someone told me the size of my champak is not...

Poster generated by Copilot AI Women’s sanitary pads were lying in the front yard as I came out of home this morning to pick up the newspaper from the gate. My brother’s dog, which roams around the houses of all three of us siblings at night, had picked up a waste bundle that someone had dumped on the roadside and brought it to my yard probably to explore it in detail. The dog spread the contents of that plastic bag all over. I have been living in Kerala for nine years now. One thing that I noticed right from my first days here is the Malayali [people of Kerala who speak Malayalam] hypocrisy. They are very proud of themselves, their culture, language, literature, literacy, cleanliness, multispecialty hospitals even in very small towns, and eradication of poverty. When it comes to cleanliness, there is a huge irony. The Malayali keeps their surroundings clean by dumping all their waste into some public space like the roadside or the rivers. I live on the roadside and have to deal ...

I have fallen in love with ChatGPT. It happened when I asked it to prepare the terminal examination question paper for my students. The work that used to take me a week was accomplished in minutes by the AI chatbot. ChatGPT takes seconds to return intelligent responses to our queries. But I had to break down the question paper into many sections and so it took minutes instead of seconds. I use the chatbot quite frequently and effectively in my classrooms. It can summarise lessons better than I do, prepare instantaneous test papers, and interpret poetry elegantly. The idea of seeking its help to prepare the question paper for the terminal examination came after I went through CBSE’s sample paper . Click the link I’ve provided here and you will see how much time and effort it will take for anyone to prepare one such question paper. I have spent a lion’s share of my life preparing such question papers and then evaluating the students’ answer sheets. When I went through the sample pa...

  Copilot Designer's illustration of 'satisficing' Satisficing is a portmanteau word coined by Nobel Prize-winning American economist and political scientist. He combined the words ‘satisfy’ and ‘suffice’ into one to describe the human tendency to make a decision that is ‘good enough’ rather than one that is necessarily optimal. Take an example to understand the notion better. Suppose A is searching for his life partner at a matrimonial site. There are so many potential brides who all look good enough. But if A goes on to find the best among them, the one that suits all his criteria and tastes, he will remain a bachelor till death. So what does A do? He satisfices by choosing one that meets his minimum acceptable criteria. When the ruling BJP decided to project Smriti Irani as the next chief minister candidate for Delhi, Herbert Simon forced himself into my consciousness. Smriti Irani lost in the last parliament election to Congress’s Kishori Lal. The margin was a...