Tomichan Matheikal's blog

This is the last post in the A-to-Z series that I have been writing in April. Most of the posts in the series touched explicitly or implicitly the post-truth politics of present India. Post-truth is the zeitgeist of India now. Facts don’t matter here. Emotions do. Slogans do. We have a Prime Minister who loves to play with words. He keeps on giving us new slogans every year, if not more frequently. Remember slogans or jingles like Achhe din aane waale hain ? Make in India (which has now become Break in India), Beti Bachao Beti Padhao, Minimum Government Maximum Governance, Sabka Saath Sabka Vikas … Hollow slogans. That has been the zeitgeist of India from 2014. Hollow. Resounding hollowness. What is the reality behind those slogans and rhetoric? I found the following illustration from a Malayalam weekly the most apt depiction of our present reality.  You know what it means. A thickly populated area in the national capital is bulldozed after Mr Modi’s supporters orchestrated ...

Yesterdays pretend to be sweet. One of the most popular poets of Kerala, ONV Kurup, composed an unforgettable song about the poet persona’s longing to return to the days of his childhood and wander once again in the courtyard where his memories roam, shake the fruit trees, draw water from the well and taste its pristine sweetness… The past is supposed to be pristine and hence sweet. I have a huge collection of old Malayalam film songs in the pen drive that plays while I drive. Many people who have travelled with me have wondered whether I’m in love with the past. I am not. My past had nothing to make me feel nostalgic about it, let alone romantic. My childhood was a pain and youth was worse. There is nothing sweet or pristine about any of it. Absolutely nothing. My childhood reminds me of the canes wielded by my parents and teachers with Gradgrindian cold brutality. Those canes were replaced by repressive social games played by certain missionaries in my youth. So why do the Mal...

Narendra Modi made nationalism India’s national pastime. The kind of nationalism that he advocates is a very narrow-minded view which amounts to his personal conviction that India is the greatest country because he was born in it. Hand in hand with that narcissism walks xenophobia. Modi’s xenophobia is not so much fear as hatred of the others. He has succeeded in raising hatred to the stature of a virtue. In 2019, Time reported that 90% of the hate crimes in the past decade happened during Modi’s reign as PM. Today, three years later, that figure will be higher, no doubt. 99% of hate crimes in the last decade in India must have happened with Modi’s tacit support. In 2016, an online dictionary cited xenophobia as the word of the year. The ascent of Trump with his kind of xenophobia is what prompted the dictionary to highlight that word. Trump hated a whole lot of people. He got along very well with Modi, however. Similar souls who had many things to hate and few to love. Xenopho...

Franz Stangl Dusseldorf, 22 Dec 1970. The court finds a 62-year-old man named Franz Stangl guilty of genocide and sentences him to life imprisonment. As soon as the verdict is passed, another man present in the courtroom takes out his wallet. pulls out a photo of Stangl, tears it up into pieces and throws it into a dustbin before walking out of the room nonchalantly. That man is Simon Wiesenthal. Wiesenthal is the man who tracked Stangl for about 20 years in order to bring him to justice. He ferreted out more than 1000 Nazi criminals and brought them to justice. With cool determination and total dedication. Why? Wiesenthal was a survivor of the Holocaust. He lost his family members, except his wife, to the Nazi genocide which killed over 6 million Jews with state support. The government becoming a mass murderer is the ultimate degeneration of a nation. When murder is made a virtue by the government, humanity itself dies without a second thought. People become murderers happily. The...

A few years ago, Home Minister Amit Shah infuriated the people of Kerala by wishing them Happy Vamana Jayanti on the occasion of their state festival Onam. While Vamana is the fifth incarnation of God Vishnu for Amit Shah and his counterparts in North India, Vamana is a monstrous impostor for Malayalis. (That’s yet another of the umpteen instances that highlight the impossibility of a monolithic Hindu religion.) Vamana sent Kerala’s most beloved king, Maveli, to the netherworld merely because of jealousy. Maveli (elision for Maha Bali or Bali the Great) was a demon (asura) king. But he was beloved to his subjects because during his reign Kerala was a utopia. There was fraternity, equality, justice, truthfulness, and so on everywhere in the kingdom. Maveli had become greater than the gods for the people of Kerala. Obviously, gods didn’t like that. So none less than Vishnu took the form of a dwarf, Vamana, and deceived Maveli. That deception was punishment from gods to an asura for b...

  Mediocre existence is utter absurdity. Poet Tennyson made the Greek hero, Ulysses, rage against that sort of existence in one of his most celebrated poems titled after the hero himself . Tennyson’s Ulysses is an old man who is quite unhappy with a life that seems idle to him. He looks around and sees the ordinary people doing nothing more than eat, mate and hoard. What’s the point of such an existence? Ulysses thinks of it as “savage” existence. Ulysses wants to live life to its fullest. “I will drink / Life to the lees” is what he says. His heart is hungry for more, more than what satisfies the ‘savage’ man. Ruling a country of ‘savages’ is not his work, Ulysses thinks. His son who possesses a different spirit of “slow prudence” can do the job of subduing a savage people “to the useful and the good.” His own mission is “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” Tennyson’s Ulysses is an eternal seeker. To be fully human and fully alive is his dream. Life never gives u...

Maggie and I went out today for some shopping and had lunch out. The government gained a few thousand rupees. We bought some clothes. The taxes were about 6% on average. Even a decent shirt costs over Rs 2000 today. I bought two shirts and a pair of trousers. Maggie bought a sari and a couple of churidars. The bill comes around Rs 20,000. The government gets 6%: that is, Rs 1200. We go for lunch. The bill is about Rs 500. The government gets Rs 60. We buy soaps and other essential items from a hypermarket. The government gets a few hundred rupees. We fill fuel in the car. The government becomes a highway thief. I buy a bottle of Morpheus brandy on the way back since it’s weekend. Cost: Rs 1386. The government gets more than Rs 800 by way of tax on that one single bottle because the tax on liquor in Kerala is 250%. Wow! I renew my car’s insurance. The government swindles me out of a few thousand rupees on the minimum premium possible. I go to the bank to check my account. The govern...