Tomichan Matheikal's blog

The Guest is a short story of Albert Camus that has remained in my consciousness for years. The protagonist, Daru, is a French schoolteacher who lives in his “schoolhouse” on a remote hillside “almost like a monk.” The setting is during the Algerian War of Independence against France. One day Daru finds himself ordered by a French gendarme to keep an Arab murderer with him for the night before taking him to the police authorities the next morning. Daru is not a shallow nationalist who will do anything that his country demands merely because he was born in that country. He believes in his own individual rights and moral duties more than in national obligations. What do patriotism and nationalism mean if they demand actions from you that go against your personal convictions? You become antinational. You can be labelled anything like ‘a terrorist’ or ‘an urban Naxal.’ You can be arrested and killed by your nation though you have done nothing wrong by your personal morality and convic...

Book Review Title: My Haven Author: Ruchi Chandra Verma Pages: 161 T his little novel is a surfeit of sugar and honey. All the characters that matter are young employees of an IT firm in Bengaluru. One of them, Pihu, 23 years and all too sweet and soft, falls in love with her senior colleague, Aditya. The love is sweetly reciprocated too. The colleagues are all happy, furthermore. No jealousy, no rivalry, nothing that disturbs the utopian equilibrium that the author has created in the novel. What would love be like in a utopia? First of all, there would be no fear or insecurity. No fear of betrayal, jealousy, heartbreak… Emotional security is an essential part of any utopia. There would be complete trust between partners, without the need for games or power struggles. Every relationship would be built on deep understanding, where partners complement each other perfectly. Miscommunication and misunderstanding would be rare or non-existent, as people would have heightened emo...

I joined the #WriteAPageADay challenge of Blogchatter , as I mentioned earlier in another post. I haven’t succeeded in writing a page every day, though. But as long as you manage to write a minimum of 10,000 words in the month of Feb, Blogchatter is contented. I woke up this morning feeling rather vacant in the head, which happens sometimes. Whenever that happens to me but I do want to get on with what I should, I fall back on a book that has inspired me. One such book is Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince . I have wished time and again to meet Little Prince in person as the narrator of his story did. We might have interesting conversations like the ones that exist in the novel. If a sheep eats shrubs, will he also eat flowers? That is one of the questions raised by Little Prince [LP]. “A sheep eats whatever he meets,” the narrator answers. “Even flowers that have thorns?” LP is interested in the rose he has on his tiny planet. When he is told that the sheep will eat f...

Valentines looking out for imperial moral police  Valentine was executed because he encouraged love between man and woman. Ironies are aplenty in his death. First of all, he was a celibate Catholic priest. He lived in the Roman Empire in a time when the Emperor believed in stuff like One Nation One Religion , and Valentine was preaching a different religion. Religion is a national affair as far as emperors are concerned. The emperor decides which god you will pray to. What else is a ruler for, if he can’t decide what you will do? So, Claudius II ordered the death of Rev Valentine because Valentine preached love which Claudius didn’t love. That was way back in the third century CE. There was no social media in those days for young lovers to start a hashtag like #SaveValentineFromBrutalClaudius . Claudius didn’t want young men to marry. He was a champion of Roman masculinity. Men will lose their masculinity if they marry, he believed. Like India’s current Prime Minister. So Cla...

Illustration by Google Gemini I was about to go to bed earlier than usual because I was feeling terribly sleepy. I had slept relatively much less in the past few nights owing to certain urgent evaluation jobs of my school that had to be completed within short period. However, as I stepped into my bedroom, I was reminded of my duties as a patriot and my sleep left me instantly. My Prime Minister sleeps just three hours a day, as he has told us repeatedly. In a 2019 interview that actor Akshay Kumar conducted for ANI, Modi’s answer to the actor’s question about the brevity of his sleep was unabashed: “Even Obama asked me this question.” By the way, Akshay Kumar was a Canadian citizen in those days. But he was a true Indian patriot, according to Modi’s partymen. Probably because he slept less than the average Indians. A few years after Kumar’s interview, Chandrakant Patel of Maharashtra BJP reduced Modi’s sleep to a meagre two hours. “Modiji works 22 hours of the day for the welfare...