Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Venkatesh's mother ( The Hindu) Venkatesh was a nine-year-old boy in a country that claims to be the third largest economy in the world. He became a bonded labourer because his mother could not repay a loan of Rs15,000 that she had taken from her employer, Muthu. He became what Muthu called “collateral.” The boy was employed in a distant farm to look after ducks and his mother was told that the loan amount now became Rs42,000 with interest and compound interest. The mother managed to collect that sum of money and reach Muthu’s farm that is 270 km away from her village. But Venkatesh wasn’t there. “He ran away,” Muthu said. The man also accused the boy of having stolen his phone and some cash. He also abused the woman and her caste. Soon there was a police investigation and Venkatesh’s decomposing body was found buried near the Palar River. The autopsy stated the cause of death as “blunt force injury to the head by heavy weapon” (sic). Today’s The Hindu has devoted one whol...

Delivering a lecture in Kerala the other day, N Ram, former editor of The Hindu , described Narendra Modi’s style of governance as “incremental authoritarianism.”   Democracy is slowly but steadily being eroded in India by Modi. How does he do it? ·       Consolidation of executive power ·       Undermining of judicial independence or press freedom ·       Weakening of opposition parties ·       Use of state apparatus to target dissent ·       Erosion of civil liberties ·       Nationalist rhetoric used to delegitimize critics ·       Misinformation and disinformation spread via all available forms of media and propaganda machinery ·       Disdain for the Constitution of the country The Parliament is a mere scarecrow today. A scarecrow in a Waste Land . Mr Modi doe...

My village river in spate The teak that stood on a side of my house came down yesterday. It had to be felled before the cyclonic winds brought it down on our house. A tree that had stood there for some three decades lay flat on the ground in less than an hour. The lithe man who brought it down branch by branch is 74 years old, I am told. He did look old, though 74 might be hyperbole. He threw a rope over a tall branch of the teak with the help of a weight attached to the end of the rope and once the rope was tied securely on to the branch, the man climbed it up like a monkey. He was right on top in the wink of an eye. The teak being felled Winds are bringing a lot of trees down in Kerala these days. Every day we hear reports about the ravages of winds. Electric power fails because trees fall on the lines. The monsoon has just started. Monsoon in Kerala means incessant rains and constant power failures. When I was a young boy, Monsoon in Kerala had similar incessant rains. But we ...

From Times of India Donald Trump is a big bullshitter but Narendra Modi is far more sinister. This is what Harry Frankfurt, author of On Bullshit , would have said, and what Meera Nanda, author of many books, actually said. I haven’t read the books by either of them. I’ve read quite a few articles written by Meera Nanda in various Indian periodicals. The latest is an interview with her by a Malayalam weekly ( Mathrubhumi ). In that interview, Nanda differentiates between ‘big lies’ and ‘deep lies’ and goes on to illustrate the two concepts with the examples of Trump and Modi. Trump is a ‘big liar’ while Modi is a ‘deep liar.’ Both are similar in their respective ‘visions’ of America-First and Hinduism-First, Prof Nanda says. Both endanger the secular fabric of their societies. However, Trump is yet to declare Christian nationalism as the official American stance while Modi has declared Hindu nationalism as the state ideology. How do the two go about materialising their vision? Tr...

“Most of us pick up morality in the course of growing up, in an unorganized manner through bits and pieces of our scattered and fragmented experiences.” I’m quoting Avichal again. The book was mentioned in my last post which was inspired by it. This book, whose subtitle is Moral Philosophy, Organisational Theory and Hostage Rescue , keeps provoking me every now and then though I haven’t developed a liking for it in general because of its tendency to scientify matters (see a page below, for example).  Morality is a personal affair. Where do we get it from? That’s the direction in which my thoughts shot off as I read Avichal’s paragraphs on the subject. I was born and brought up in an extremely orthodox Catholic family in the rural backyards of Kerala. The children woke up when the rouser bell tolled at 5.30 am from the parish church not far from home. We were too many children, ten of us to be precise, because our parents were strict adherents of their Church’s injunctions o...