Tomichan Matheikal's blog

The Global Peace Index 2024 reports that 92 countries are currently engaged in conflicts beyond their borders, marking the highest number since World War II. The latest conflict between India and Pakistan is not included in that statistic. What do these wars achieve? As Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote, “The old woman will keep waiting for her martyred son. That girl will wait for her beloved husband. And those children will wait for their heroic father.” The leaders will shake hands, he said. History will be rewritten. New heroes will be born. But the ordinary citizens pay the price for every war. Wars kill people, first of all. World War II killed 70 to 85 million people. Millions of people are displaced by wars. The present Ukrainian crisis alone has displaced more than 14 million people from their homes, 6 million of them are refugees in other countries. Famine and starvation are the next problems. The endless civil war in Yemen, for example, has driven 17 million peopl...

By Gemini AI “Is there any politician who is a poet or artist of any sort?” Anu asks me. Anu – Anushri is her official name – is a former student of mine. She gave up science though she was good at it and took up literature for graduation after which she pursued a journalism course with a prominent media house and then became a journalist. There are a few of them, I tell her. I name Vaclav Havel and our very own Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Anu thinks I am joking when I mention Vajpayee because she knows how much I detest Vajpayee’s political party to which the present Prime Minister of India belongs. “Did Vajpayee write any good poetry?” Anu asks. “I’m not sure,” I say. “He wrote stuff like: क़दम मिलाकर चलना होगा। We will have to go forward together. ” I remember one or two such lines of Vajpayee from my teaching days in Delhi. My students there used to recite such stuff in the morning assembly.   “That sounds more like politics than poetry,” Anu protests. I meet Anu onc...

Illustration by Gemini AI Yudhishthira hesitated at the threshold of heaven. They had won the war. But what did they really achieve? Behold this field teeming with kinsmen and friends , Yudhishthira had lamented looking at the mutilated corpses on the battlefield of Kurukshetra. Vultures and jackals had started feeding on the bodies of people he knew, he loved, he never wished to kill. What glory lies in a kingdom won at such a cost? His brothers looked at one another. They had no answer to their eldest brother’s, the new King’s, question. The immoral Kauravas had been routed. Duryodhana’s arrogance and egotism lay crushed in Kurukshetra’s dust. Even the mighty Karna, with his nobility that had deserved acknowledgement and appreciation, was decimated. Immorally. A lot of adharma was perpetrated by the Pandavas in the name of Dharma! Even Krishna couldn’t win it without some adharma. Much adharma! Yudhishthira bowed his head in shame. What did our victory mean? He knew that...

Book Review Title: The Lucky Ones: A Memoir Author: Zara Chowdhary Publisher: Context – Westland Books, 2024 Pages: 309 At the beginning of Julian Barnes’s novel, The Sense of an Ending , history is described by a young student as “the lies of the victors.” His teacher reminds him that it could also be “the self-delusions of the defeated.” Later, as the young student grows up into a mature adult and sees more of life, he learns that history is “more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious nor defeated.” Zara Chowdhary is a survivor – neither victor nor defeated – of the 2002 anti-Muslim Gujarat riots which she calls “genocide” many times in her book. She was a 16-year-old girl just about to complete her school when she and many others like her got trapped in the little worlds of their houses as murderous mobs went around entering the houses of Muslims, killing the men and raping the women, and perpetrating some most inhuman deeds such as ripping...

India has retaliated. My morning news on Asianet used the word ‘revenge’ gleefully. India has taken revenge on Pakistan . A few friends texted me personally to imply that Modi, whose faithful critic I have been, is a real hero, fit to be a world champion. A septuagenarian and former professor of sociology quoted Modi proudly: “ Ab Bharat ka pani Bharat ke haq mein bahegi. ” Now India’s water will flow for India’s benefits. The rivers flowing into Pakistan have been blocked by Modi. My response to the prof, who is apparently aging without acquiring wisdom, was: “That’s a jingoistic view. I’d put is as: India won’t tolerate terrorism and we know how to deal with it.” I’m not against violence per se. You can’t preach nonviolence to an aggressive buffalo, as a proverb in my mother tongue says. I salute India’s latest action on Pakistani terrorists. They deserve it. However, my question to my old prof friend – who is as much a fan of Modi as I am his critic – is: Does that retaliati...