Tomichan Matheikal's blog

  “History is the lies of the victors,” says the narrator of Julian Barnes’s novel The Sense of an Ending . The narrator is a young student when he says this. Later he will alter his opinion. When he expresses this opinion, however, his history teacher adds that history is “also the self-delusions of the defeated.” Many years later, having learnt many lessons from life, the narrator says that history is “more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious nor defeated.” Memories aren’t quite reliable, however. That’s another motif in the novel. More often than not, what we remember is not what actually happened. We shape and reshape our memories to suit various purposes such as forging bearable meanings to our experiences and adding colours to our dull existence. We do that not only for ourselves but others as well. As Barnes says in the same novel, “when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts fo...

  Fiction ‘That’s very absurd,’ Subramanian Sir said. He had just listened to the plot of a novel that Arvind Kumar was planning to write. Subramanian was Arvind’s teacher at Sawan Public School. The school was devoured a few years ago when one godman whose ashram lay next to the school desired to extend his territory like the kings of the olden days who had no imagination to make better use of their leisure than attack weak neighbouring countries. When the school died, Subramanian stopped teaching and chose to be in a protracted depression. Arvind, being a beloved pupil of olden days, visited the old teacher whenever the idea for a new story or poem struck him. Whenever Arvind visited his beloved teacher, the old man would be sitting in an armchair with closed eyes, legs hoisted on the low table in front, and listening to Gandhi’s favourite hymn, Raghupati Raghav Raja Ram . The lines he particularly liked were ‘Ishwar Allah tero naam, sabko sanmati de bhagwan.’ ‘If I say y...

  When one percent began oppressing 99 percent, civilisation was born. That is one of the arguments of Rutger Bregman in his Hopeful History of Humankind . Even today we have a world where one percent oppresses 99%. The one percent consists of some super-rich and certain governments or political systems. “Civilisation has become synonymous with peace and progress, and wilderness with war and decline. In reality, for most of human existence, it was the other way around.” That’s Bregman again. We think of ourselves as civilised and our ancient ancestors as savages. Bregman shows that most of those ancestors were far more benign than us towards each other as well as the planet. When someone decided to put up a fence around some area and said, ‘This is mine,’ the problem began. Earlier people shared whatever was there. They couldn’t think of amassing food, for example, when another member of the tribe went hungry. It just wouldn’t happen because they didn’t have such notions as h...

  Don't go, there are too many holy people out there! ‘The Saint’ is a short story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The central figure is Margarito Duarte whose wife died long ago shortly after giving birth to their only daughter. Eventually the daughter also succumbs to an illness at the tender age of 7. Eleven years after the death of the daughter, the village cemetery is taken over for the construction of a dam. People are asked to move the mortal remains of their buried relatives from the graves. When Margarito Duarte digs up the graves of his wife and daughter, he is in for a surprise. While his wife’s body had turned to dust, the girl’s remained intact. Even the roses buried with her still retained their “fresh-cut” fragrance. A miracle, obviously. “The incorruptibility of the body was an unequivocal sign of sainthood,” writes Marquez. The rest of the story is about Duarte’s single-minded attempts to get his daughter canonized, declared as a saint, by the Pope. Pope Pius XII was ...

  The latest issue of The Week What kind of a ruler will get over 7000 people arrested on extremely serious charges of sedition when what they actually did was to criticise him or his political party? 7000 plus. Yeah, that is the number of Indians arrested for sedition after Narendra Modi became the Prime Minister. The youngest among them was an 11-year-old girl. In that one case alone related to that little girl, 85 children aged between 9 and 11 were questioned by the Karnataka police for crimes of sedition. Let those numbers sink in. And then try to imagine a nine-year-old child committing an act of treason. And then absorb a few more figures. Of the 7000 plus Indians arrested for treason from 2014 onward, 149 were arrested just for criticising Modi and 144 for criticising Ajay Mohan Bisht aka Yogi Adityanath. Many of the arrests are plainly ridiculous for any sensible observer though they are very agonising for the people concerned. Take one recent example, just for examp...

  One of the dioceses of the Catholic Church in Kerala is offering sops to believers for having more children and thus saving the Church from extinction. This is diametrically opposite to what Pope Francis said last year: Catholics don’t need to breed “like rabbits.” Catholics have a moral responsibility to limit the number of their children, the Pope said in no uncertain terms.   The National Catholic Reporter wrote thus about the Pope: “ Telling the story of a woman he met in a parish in Rome several months ago who had given birth to seven children via caesarean section and was pregnant with an eighth, Francis asked: 'Does she want to leave the seven orphans?’” Pope Francis has always advocated responsible parenthood. Having more children is not a service to God or the Church or the State, he has said loud and clear. Having too many children is “irresponsible parenthood,” according to the Pope. He went to the extent of saying, “This is to tempt God.” There are 7.6...

  I get a lot of queries from students as well as teachers about Gordon Cook's essay prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's class 11 English course. So I thought of presenting certain salient points here. [I'm thus saving myself from having to answer too many people.] Gordon Cook was replicating the second voyage made by Captain James Cook from 1772 to 1775. Gordon Cook is not related directly to James Cook. James Cook was married but none of his children married and none of them had children of their own. So there are no direct descendants of Captain James Cook.  James Cook undertook three voyages all of which started from Plymouth, the same starting point of Gordon Cook too. But only the second one was for circumnavigating the globe. The missions of the other two were different. Gordon Cook intended to go round the world too in a ship similar to the one used by his role model.  Resolution and Adventure, a painting by William Hodges Strictly speaking, the Resolution did not st...