Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Book Review Title : Little Things, Big Things Author: Swarnali Nath To live life as a perpetual celebration is not easy, especially since we live in a highly troubled world. There are all sorts of violence all around: personal, social, political, religious, and national. How do we celebrate life in spite of all that? Swarnali Nath’s self-help book is a rich guide which contains various concepts of happiness collected from diverse regions and cultures. Every chapter of this, without exception, has an exotic title like Omoiyari and Livsnjutare . They are all words taken from languages like Japanese or Norwegian. Each one of them refers to a particular way of understanding happiness, a particular key to happiness. Swarnali [I’m referring to her by her first name because of our familiarity with each other through blogging] has done much research before writing this book, as evidenced by the elaborate bibliography and references at the end. I had read a part of this book earlier ...

The above video was sent to me on WhatsApp by a friend who also asked me to write a blog post on the injustices of capitalism. The friend quoted Lenin: “Capitalism is going to give us the rope with which we are going to hang them.” I wasn’t particularly enthused by the message or the demand for a blog post because I am like Benjamin the donkey in Orwell’s Animal Farm . Benjamin is cynical when it comes to politics. He knows that no party or ideology is going to make any substantial difference as far as the common folk are concerned. What can be an alternative to capitalism, for instance? Socialism/Communism? Benign dictatorship? Theocracy? The video above shows the absolute heartlessness of capitalism. But has socialism/communism been any better in the erstwhile USSR, China, and present North Korea, Venezuela, and Cuba? Dictatorship and theocracy are not economic systems, but have they saved any nation from injustices? I believe the problem is not with systems or ideologies . T...

When a huge concrete cross was being shattered with a demolition hammer, I laughed rather raucously. I was watching the breakfast news on TV as usual. Most of the time, breakfast news is depressing with news about drug addicts, rapists, murderers, and politicians. This video of a cross being brought down in a very unceremonious ritual officiated by revenue mandarins was unique in a country of people whose religious sentiments are more brittle than dry leaves in an Indian summer. Maggie was not amused at all by my laughter because she misunderstood that I was laughing at a religious leaf being crushed with a political hammer. “This is the same cross in front of which our X (I named a very close relative of ours) fell prostrate a couple of months back during their picnic to Parumthumpara,” I explained. “She is a very spiritual person and so she respected the cross, that’s all.” Maggie’s spirituality is more like a leaf in a storm: I am the satanic storm and she is the tenacious ...

Jayasree Kalathil, Sandhya Mary, and the book Book Review Title: Maria, Just Maria Author: Sandhya Mary Translator: Jayasree Kalathil T his is a crazy novel. It is hard to find a normal human being in it. There is more than one place in the narrative where we are told that every human being is insane to some degree. I won’t disagree with that. However, there are certain standards or wavelengths which are generally considered to be ‘normal’ if not sane and it is that normalcy which keeps the world going. Sandhya Mary’s debut novel flings a huge question mark on that normalcy. As I was reading this novel, I was constantly reminded of a joke that Albert Camus narrates in his brilliant essay on the meaning of life, The Myth of Sisyphus . A madman is sitting by a swimming pool with a fishing rod in hand. Seeing his serenity, his psychiatrist [I think in Camus’s own version it’s just a passerby – but I find the psychiatrist more appropriate] asks him whether he has caught any fish....

A page from Time Broligarchy is a new word I learnt from the latest issue of the Time magazine one of whose lead stories is titled ‘ American Broligarchy ’. Wikipedia teaches me that ‘broligarchy’ is “a neologism and portmanteau combining oligarchy and broism describing the rule of government by a coterie of extremely wealthy men (occupying leadership roles in the tech companies and tech-enabled businesses).” The Time article informs us that Trump’s greatest “bros” are Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, the three men who were given the most prominent seats, ahead of Cabinet members, at Trump’s Presidential inauguration. These wealthy businessmen play crucial roles in Trump’s way of governing America. They pump a lot of unregulated money into politics for their own selfish reasons. A menacing outcome is an unhealthy (for the public) expansion of presidential power with fewer checks on the Congress. The Time laments that this “would be a recipe for more corruption under an...