Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Fiction “Appa is happy,” Lily said for the seventh time, or maybe eighth.   Appa smiled at Simon.   Lily’s Appa was Simon’s uncle.   In other words, Lily and Simon were cousins.   Simon visited because Uncle had developed a medical problem all of a sudden.   Old age had caught up with him finally.   This man who would never sit at home was now confined to a wheelchair.   A few nerves had become dysfunctional.   From the time of his retirement, Uncle’s hobby was travelling and visiting relatives.   Until the nerves ditched him at the age of 82, he went on his own to all the relatives whom he could reach by bus or on foot.   “Relationships are the only things that remain,” Uncle once told Simon when one of his perennial journeys brought him to Simon’s home.   That was a couple of years back. “I used to visit the old people in the houses on this road,” Uncle said pointing at the main road outside.   “Big h...

18 th century French naturalist the Comte de Buffon wrote that the people of America had small and feeble sex organs so much so the men living there had “no ardour for the female.”   He wrote that and much more in his much-esteemed book Histoire Naturelle .   America was a land where the water was stagnant, the soil unproductive, and the animals without size or vigour, their constitutions weakened by the noxious vapours that rose from its rotting swamps and sunless forests.   The environment sapped the vitality of even the native Indians who had “no beard or body hair.” Many writers embraced Buffon’s views and took them to more readers.   One popular Dutch writer added that the American males lacked vitality so much that “they had milk in their breasts.”   The views found their way to many European books until almost the end of the 19 th century. People are eager to believe the written word.   It’s even more so when the text is something...

Everyone wants to be happy.   The Dalai Lama, head of Tibetan Buddhism, is of the opinion that we possess the key to happiness.   We are like the person who has been knocking on a door again and again without ever checking whether the door was locked in the first place.   The door to happiness is not locked.   So we don’t need any key.   We just need a change of attitudes . Image Courtesy We are like the woman who was searching for her lost earring in the sunlit front yard of the house though she had lost it inside the house.   When asked about it she said, “But there’s no light inside.”   She was searching for the right thing in the wrong place.   We keep searching for happiness in wrong places like wealth, position, luxury, etc. The Dalai Lama puts compassion in the top of the list of attitudes that generate happiness.   Compassion for other people is essential not only for our personal inner development but also for ha...