Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Caution : This is a personal post mandated as the finale of the A2ZChallenge by Blogchatter . April was a hectic month. The A2ZChallenge from Blogchatter demanded a blog post every day of the month leaving out the 4 Sundays. It wasn’t easy to cope with the demand since my duty as an examiner got me driving from home at 7 in the morning only to return at 6 in the evening in the first two weeks of April. A tragedy in the family kept me in the doldrums in the latter half of the month. In spite of all that, I managed to meet the challenge with a religious dedication. I just didn’t want to give up for this once at least. I acknowledge my gratitude to Blogchatter for giving me the challenge as well as publicity for my blog. I thank the team in anticipation for their help in bringing out my 26 A to Z posts as an e-book titled Life’s Magic . There are a few individuals – whose comments came personally via WhatsApp – who sustained me in spite of the temptations to capitulat...

From Reader's Digest Universal Dictionary p.1701 Weltanschauung is a German word for one’s personal philosophy or worldview. We all have our own Weltanschauung though we may not be conscious of it. Our actions are guided by our Weltanschauung. If we see the world as a hostile place, we will keep a safe distance from it or deal with it warily. The Weltanschauung of Mahatma Gandhi or Mother Teresa was moulded by compassion while that of Jawaharlal Nehru and Bertrand Russell was founded on reason and logic. While our genes play a major role in shaping our Weltanschauung, the environment in which we grew up and the people who nurtured us in our childhood are responsible for our Weltanschauung to a great extent. My Weltanschauung would have been quite different from what it is, had I been brought up in a different environment and taught by different people. Having said that, I must hasten to add that as I grew up into adulthood I changed much of what my parents and teachers...

Life is like a trek in the mountains. Every peak entices you. Standing on the zenith, you look at other peaks which beckon you. Conquests, that’s what trekking is about; that’s what life is about. The joy that a trekker experiences while standing on the zenith of a mountain is quite different from, say, what you experience when you receive a promotion at your office. Real conquests fill the spirit with a new vigour in spite of all the pain you endured on the way. The rugged paths through the mountain slopes, the exhaustion on the way and the rain and the sun that you braved, they don’t matter now. In fact, they metamorphose into a special kind of joy. As Richard Bach said, when you have conquered certain heights you don’t want to go down; you want to spread your wings and fly. That’s what zeniths do to you. You don’t want to go down; you want to spread your wings and fly. Zeniths that really enrich life are not about amassing more wealth or attaining higher positions...

At Allahabad Triveni Sangam where I said Yes to one of the harshest realities of my life “I don’t know Who – or what – put the question, I don’t know when it was put. I don’t even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone – or Something – and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal.” Dag Hammarskjold, Secretary General of the UNO wrote those words just four months before his death in 1961. Saying Yes to reality is a self-surrender. Unless you can surrender yourself to both the joys and sorrows of life, both hope and despair, light and darkness, you can’t say Yes to reality. Your triumph in life is a catastrophe and the catastrophes of life are triumphs when you say Yes to reality. Your Yes to reality carries you to the realisation that “the only elevation possible to man lies in the depths of humiliation” (Hammarskjold’s words). There is no greatness in life that is ...

My Xanadu must have a lot of water and greenery Xanadu is a paradise. Originally it was the summer palace of Kublai Khan celebrated by poet Coleridge in his poem, ‘Kubla Khan’. The Tatars ruled by Khan were barbaric. Khan created his personal paradise, Xanadu, as a refuge from the savagery of both his people and the nature. We all need to create our own Xanadus in order to take shelter from the resounding savagery around us. Each one of us must find his/her own way of creating the personal paradise. I create my Xanadu through reading and writing. You can create yours following your own passions. Music, craft, gardening – there is an infinite variety of options open to you for the creation of your Xanadu. It is a place or ambience that gives you personal gratification. It helps you move closer towards self-realisation. In the biblical creation myth, Adam and Eve lived in the Paradise created by God until the couple was driven by the irresistible human urge to know good ...

“Words, words, words,” says Hamlet when Polonius asks him what he is reading. When asked further what the words are about Hamlet’s answer is, “Slanders, sir.” Rumours and slanders abound in people’s usual conversations. We love conversations. Have you ever noticed that most of our conversations are about other people and that most of the time we speak bad things about others? Words can kill. People love to kill the reputations of other people. But words can heal too. Words can be magical. Words create music. If we change the way we wield words, we can usher in magic to our life, to the world itself. A good word, a word of encouragement, a word of joy can transform the life of the person to whom it is uttered. One of the tragedies in our life is to begin the day with the morning newspaper which brings us negative words: reports about rising prices and taxes, rapes by spiritual leaders, corruption of political leaders, and so on. It is difficult to sustain our smiles in su...

Image courtesy here “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society,” said Jiddu Krishnamurti. There are too many well-adjusted people today. They are rich, they are found frequently in shopping malls and entertaining places, and they are religious. They are well-adjusted at home too. The husband and the wife have their own entertainments and possibly partners outside home. The children find their own entertainments wherever they are. After all, they all live barricaded safely in their gated communities. They have insurance for everything from themselves to the last item in the kitchen. Everything is taken care of. Perfect. And yet sick. They are so sick that they have to visit gyms and/or detox clinics to extract the venom within. They need gurus most of whom are fake to give them spiritual solace. They have medical insurance to pay their unending hospital bills. Hospitals generate more diseases than they cure. Medicines become food instead of...