Tomichan Matheikal's blog

While having a frugal breakfast of dosa with chutney, I watched my wife’s face.   Pain was writ large on it.   Two days of struggle with viral fever and splitting headache had taken much toll on her.   I was about to complete a week’s glorious grappling with the disease. “There’s so much pain in human life,” I initiated a conversation. “Illnesses, injustices, exploitation, chicanery, malice… Yet we believe that there’s some god sitting up there and looking after us lovingly.” She ignored me.   She didn’t even bother to look at me.   Even her own pain wouldn’t deter her from her faith, I knew.   Faith is very strong.   Faith doesn’t need logic or any other support.   Majority of the people believe in god and religion.   What the majority do is right.   Psychology has proved it indubitably that people don’t like to get into conflict with the group’s ways.   If the group says gau mutra is holy, it is holy.   If...

Some illnesses can make us feel totally helpless.   You just can’t do anything except lie down and suffer.   The viral fever that kept me bedridden for a few days is one such illness.   I know there are worse things than a viral fever that can torture the very marrow of your bones.   This is the first time in my life that a disease left me totally enervated.   This is the first time in my life that I slept for some sixty hours continuously except for the essential intervals in between.   The sleep was a balm for the tortured body.   The mind too sodden with the side effects of all sorts of tablets I shoved down my throat needed rest. Eventually I fell in love with the rest.   I didn’t need sleep anymore.   I just needed to lie down and stretch the body lazily. The various pains had abated though every now and then a bout of cough would erupt pulling every nerve in your lower abdomen in a thousand opposing ways.   Exce...

I was thrilled beyond my wits because it is not often that one stumbles upon Don Quixote.   I greeted him with folded arms first, then shook hands with him before embracing him tight.   Really tight. So tight that he gasped and pushed me away.   “Real love does not display itself so smotheringly,” he managed to speak through the gasps. I apologised profusely and explained that I couldn’t contain my excitement on seeing him this Sunday morning when the monsoon clouds deceitfully played hide-and-seek in God’s own country. “Ah, gods and clouds!” He exclaimed. “Never trust either of them. They are part of the world’s madness.” “You were the sanest, Don,” I could not suppress my admiration of the man who single-mindedly pursued his dreams.   He laughed heartily.   “Where do you draw the line of sanity, my friend?”   Millions of people dying of starvation when tonnes of food is wasted due to mismanagement or sheer callousness. ...