Tomichan Matheikal's blog

I wrote a lot more in Feb 2025 than in the past many months. The Blogchatter has been responsible for that with their #WriteAPageADay challenge. My association with this blogging community is rather short: just a little over four years. I’m concluding the Write-a-page-a-day challenge with this retrospective post. With their various ‘challenges’ such as Write-a-page-a-day and A-to-Z , Blogchatter gave me a lot of impetus to write regularly. Writing sustains me as a person more than anything else because there’s no other place where I can express my views and feelings so freely. Even AI [Artificial Intelligence] has accused me, albeit subtly, of being opinionated. Read, if you wish, what ChatGPT said about my blog the other day on my request: here . I took interest in writing long ago when I was a school student. I wrote in Malayalam in those days because I did my entire schooling in a rustic Malayalam medium government-aided school where English was taught by teachers of chemist...

Book Review Title: Strong Woman: Reba Rakshit Author: Ida Jo Pajunen Publisher: Om Books International, 2024 Pages: 218 Reba Rakshit was a rare kind of entertainer. She could lift an elephant on her chest. She would lie on a mat and a huge plank would be placed on her chest. An elephant would walk on that plank. Reba could bear the weight of that elephant though for a few seconds. Reba was born in what now is Bangladesh. She migrated with her sister to Calcutta (today Kolkata) to live with her uncle who promised them good education. That was a decade and a half before India became independent. A man named Bishnu Charan Gosh discovered Reba’s potential and trained her to become a performer. He was running a college of physical education in Calcutta where Reba became a trainee while she was also pursuing regular school studies. Eventually Ghosh made Reba capable of doing many things like breath control using yoga, weight-lifting, and mind control. Soon enough, Ghosh found h...

  Book Review Title: Stone Yard Devotional Author: Charlotte Wood Publisher: Sceptre 2023 Pages: 297 W hen a novel starts with a middle-aged woman giving up her job in despair and entering into retreat in a cloistered convent where soon arrives the bones of a nun who died long ago elsewhere, it may be presumed to be a suspense thriller or crime fiction. Add plague in the background with mice running all around, and it can become horror. Then comes in another character who was absolutely disliked by the narrator in their schooldays. Charlotte Wood’s latest novel has all of these but it is no thriller or crime fiction or horror story. It is an allegory of sorts on very gentle themes like forgiveness and redemption. The narrator has no name in the novel. The nun who comes with the bones of Sister Jenny who died two decades ago was a school classmate of the narrator. Jenny was probably killed by an American missionary priest in Bangkok where the nun was rendering her serv...

“T here’s a story behind Pole Star which is known as Dhruva Nakshatram in our language,” I said to Davis (not his real name), a 14-year-old who thought a bit too much of himself like most youngsters of today. He was with me next to the driver’s seat in my car and I was his driver in his view. “Are you interested in the story?” Davis’s silence told me clearly that he wasn’t. He wasn’t interested in anything except himself and that was the problem which his mother had brought to me. I told him the story, in spite of his indifference. “Dhruva was the son of King Uttanapada and Queen Suniti. His father favoured his other wife, Suruchi, and her son.” “Lucky guys they were, weren’t they?” Davis interrupted. “Who?” “Those kings of olden days. They could have a lot of wives.” “You want a lot of wives?” “Nah,” he was contemptuous. “I want only girlfriends, not wives.” “You don’t want to take up responsibilities, right?” “Who wants to? Would you take up responsibilities if yo...

Illustration by Copilot Designer Tamil Nadu chief minister M K Stalin has once again pitted the Tamil pride against Hindi pride . He has been championing the Dravidian cause against the Aryan Shahs of Delhi for quite some time now. Just last month, he offered a prize of $1 million to anyone who can decode the Indus Valley script which, Stalin believes as I too do, was proto-Dravidian. As a South Indian, I’m on Stalin’s side. The North shouldn’t impose their culture and language and gods on the Southerners. I’m not speaking on behalf of anyone, please. I’m expressing my personal views. If some people of South India want to be bossed over by someone from the North, that’s their wish and I have no problem with it. I don’t want a native version of colonialism. Like Stalin, I too believe that the Indus Valley Civilisation was Dravidian. Like him again, I would like more research to go into it. The truth may take the entire the wind out of the Hindutva sails. Moreover, the steamroller...