Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Courtesy Here If God is with you, you needn’t fear anything. I was taught that in my childhood. That was a paraphrase of what Saint Paul wrote to Romans (8:31): “If God is for us, who can be against us?” I was reminded of that when I read about Madho Sing II, King of Jaipur, this afternoon. Madho Singh received an invitation to the coronation ceremony of King Edward VII (1902). But good Hindus don’t travel across the ocean. Crossing the ocean meant mingling with all sorts of people and thus losing your racial and caste supremacy or purity or whatever. But Madho Singh wanted to attend the coronation if only to please King Edward. Also to see London along with his entire family. Find a solution, he ordered the royal priests. After all, when the problem is related to your religion, the priests are the right people to find the solution. And find they did. Tell the people of the country that their favourite god Sri Gopalji wishes to visit England. Gods have no canonical barriers. Th...

Paracetamol kills more people annually than plane crashes. A medical practitioner as well as academic, Dr C Aravinda, tells us that. The doc has written an article titled, ‘Over the counter, under the radar: can paracetamol be fatal?’ in the very first volume of Surf&Dive , a new publication from The Hindu . The article says that in the USA alone, paracetamol accounts for more than 60,000 emergency hospital visits annually and over 500 deaths. He draws a contrast between those figures and the 229 deaths that happened globally due to aviation accidents in 2023. The number of people killed by paracetamol globally every year will be many times more than the figure quoted above. There is no sufficient data available from other continents and hence we don’t know how many are killed by paracetamol there, let alone the victims of other medicines. Are our hospitals killers? I wouldn’t, of course, go to the extent of asserting that much. I have depended on the hospitals many times tho...

Dashrath Manjhi My country is completing 75 years of its being a republic. I’ve been asked to deliver a short speech in the morning assembly of my school on the occasion. How to speak to young students on a political topic? I expressed my concern to a colleague who then asked me what being a republic actually means. Isn’t independence enough? That was enough for me to get the stuff for my speech. Independence or freedom is dangerous without duties and responsibilities. The Constitution brings us those duties and responsibilities while also guaranteeing us the security we require as citizens. Liberty, fraternity, equality, justice, freedom to worship whichever god you like… No, I can’t speak on those things to school students. So, I contemplated a while… and remembered Dashrath Manjhi. In 1959, a poor young woman died in a remote village in Bihar. She had had a fall on the mountainside where she lived with her husband, Dashrath Manjhi, a poor tribesman. Dashrath wanted to save h...

Neeti Nair Book Discussion The epigraph of Neeti Nair’s book, Hurt Sentiment [see previous two posts for more on the book, links below], is a quote from Pakistani poet Fahmida Riaz (1946-2018).             In the past I used to think with sadness             today I laughed a lot as I thought             you turned out exactly like us             we were not two nations, brother! ‘We’ refer to Pakistan and India. India has now become a Hindu Pakistan with a Hindu Jinnah as prime minister. It is said that we tend to become like our enemies. The Hindu Jinnah’s India has proved that even nations can become like their enemies. Neeti Nair’s book has only four chapters plus an introduction and an epilogue. I discussed the first two chapters in the last two pos...

Book Discussion The Indian National Congress Party is repeatedly accused of Muslim appeasement by Narendra Modi and his followers. Did the Congress appease Muslims more than it did the Hindus? Neeti Nair deals with that question in the second chapter of her book, Hurt Sentiments , which I introduced in my previous post: The Triumph of Godse . The first instance of a book being banned in India occurred as an effort to placate a religious community. That was in 1955. It was done by none other than the first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru. The book was Aubrey Menen’s retelling of The Ramayana . Menen’s writing has a fair share of satire and provocative incisiveness. Nehru banned the sale of the book in India (it was published in England) in order to assuage the wounded Hindu sentiments. The book “outrages the religious feelings of the Hindus,” Nehru’s government declared. That was long before the Indira Gandhi’s Congress government banned Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses ...