Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Illustration by Gemini AI Fiction Why does the sea rage endlessly? Varghese asked himself as he sat on the listless sands of the beach looking at the sinking sun beyond the raging waves. When rage becomes quotidian, no one notices it. What is unnoticed is futile. Like my life, Varghese muttered to himself with a smirk whose scorn was directed at himself. He had turned seventy that day. That’s why he was on the beach longer than usual. It wasn’t the rage of the waves or the melancholy of the setting sun that kept him on the beach. Self-assessment kept him there. Looking back at the seventy years of his life made him feel like an utter fool, a dismal failure. Integrity versus Despair, Erik Erikson would have told him. He studied Erikson’s theory on human psychological development as part of an orientation programme he had to attend as a teacher. Aged people reflect on their lives and face the conflict between feeling a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction (integrity) or a feeli...

Russia’s Putin announced the demise of liberalism, America’s Trump wrote its obituary, and India’s Modi wielded the death as a political forge that transmuted him into a demigod. We are, unfortunately, passing through an era of so-called “strong leaders” like Putin, Trump, and Modi. A 2024 report based on a 2023 Pew survey found that 67% Indians endorsed a governing system with a “strong leader” who can make decisions without interference from courts or parliament. This support for autocracy was the highest among all surveyed nations and has increased consistently after Modi became the PM. Shockingly, the same 2023 survey found that 72% of Indian respondents expressed a favourable view of military rule. Indians don’t want individual freedom, it seems. We are used to the many gods who incarnated at appropriate times and destroyed evil ( Sambhavami yuge yuge ). Modi is our present divine incarnation. It is the duty of these avatars to conquer evil; hence individual freedom doesn’t ...

A century ago, T S Eliot wrote about the hollowness of his countrymen in a poem titled The Hollow Men . The World War I had led to a lot of disillusionment with the collapse of powerful empires and the savagery of the war itself which unleashed barbaric slaughter. The generation that survived was known as the “Lost Generation.” Before the war, Western civilisation was sustained by certain values and principles given by religion, the Enlightenment, and Victorian morality. The war showed that science and technology, which could improve life, had actually produced machine guns, gas warfare, and mass death. Religion became hollow. People became hollow. “We are the hollow men,” Eliot’s poem began. The civilisation looked sophisticated from outside, but it was empty inside. There is a lot of religion today in the world. My country has allegedly become so religious that it decides what you will eat, wear, which god you will pray to, and even the language for communication. The ultimat...

A moment of triumph for India’s women’s cricket team turned unexpectedly into a controversy about religious faith and expression, thanks to some right-wing footsloggers. After her stellar performance in the semi-final of the Wormen’s World Cup (2025), Jemimah Rodrigues thanked Jesus for her achievement. “Jesus fought for me,” she said quoting the Bible: “Stand still and God will fight for you” [1 Samuel 12:16]. Some BJP leaders and their mindless followers took strong exception to that and roiled the religious fervour of the bourgeoning right wing with acerbic remarks. If Ms Rodrigues were a Hindu, she would have thanked her deity: Ram or Hanuman or whoever. Since she is a Christian, she thanked Jesus. What’s wrong in that? If she was a nonbeliever like me, God wouldn’t have topped the list of her benefactors. Religion is a talisman for a lot of people. There’s nothing wrong in imagining that some god sitting in some heaven is taking care of you. In fact, it gives a lot of psychologic...

Illustration by Gemini AI “Krishna touches my hand. If you can call it a hand, these pinpricks of light that are newly coalescing into the shape of fingers and palm. At his touch something breaks, a chain that was tied to the woman-shape crumpled on the snow below. I am buoyant and expansive and uncontainable – but I always was so, only I never knew it! I am beyond the name and gender and the imprisoning patterns of ego. And yet, for the first time, I’m truly Panchali. I reach with my other hand for Karna – how surprisingly solid his clasp! Above us our palace waits, the only one I’ve ever needed. Its walls are space, its floor is sky, its center everywhere. We rise; the shapes cluster around us in welcome, dissolving and forming and dissolving again like fireflies in a summer evening.” What is quoted above is the final paragraph of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s novel The Palace of Illusions which I reread in the last few days merely because I had time on my hands and this book hap...