Tomichan Matheikal's blog

The last of post of January confessed that I was participating in the #WriteAPageADay campaign of Blogchatter which entailed writing a page every day of Feb. I managed to complete the campaign successfully though there were three days on which I could not write anything for various reasons. Such days are also part of the campaign, thanks to the magnanimity of the Blogchatter team. I avoided politics as far as possible during the campaign. I wrote posts which were more interesting, in my reckoning, during Feb. But some of my regular readers seem to have abandoned me in Feb. I don’t know the reason. Maybe, many of them were busy with the campaign. Maybe, my ricocheting from one subject to another didn’t amuse some of them. Maybe, it’s time to take stock of the very relevance of traditional blog posts in the world of YouTube and podcasts and others. As I’m concluding the Write a Page campaign with this post, it is quite natural that some sort of self-assessment struck my meditati...

Fiction I was not surprised when I ran into Kurian in the town because I had heard from neighbours that he was back from Canada on holiday after a long gap of many years. I recognised him immediately because he had not changed at all except that his tummy had bulged a little. He rushed to me as soon as he saw me and gave me a bear’s hug. I wriggled out of that hug telling him to be careful. “We are in a different India now. There are all sorts of spies everywhere including moral police.” He laughed as he always used to do. Life was never a serious affair for him. We both studied in the same school, the government-aided Malayalam medium school run by the parish church of the village. Due to pressure from home, I put in my best and did fairly well in the exams while Kurian hardly managed to pass. When the teachers came with the answer sheets and made fun of Kurian’s answers, he laughed. I wondered sometimes whether he realised that the joke was upon him. Of course, he was no idiot....

  From Pillai's article The latest issue of the Open magazine [March 6] has an interesting article by Madhavankutty Pillai. Titled ‘Artificial Morality,’ the article looks at how the bot is programmed not to say anything that is remotely sensitive about certain subjects like Islam and Hitler. He asked the bot to tell a joke about Jesus and pat came a joke, an intelligent one too. Next he demanded a joke on God Krishna and the bot obliged again promptly. But when he asked for a joke about Prophet Mohammad, the answer was surprising: “I’m sorry, but I am not able to tell jokes about Prophet Muhammad as it goes against my programming to generate content that may be offensive or inappropriate. Can I help you with something else?” More than a month before I read the above article, I wrote in a post about my kind of prayer which is a very candid and friendly conversation with the god who was put very many years ago in my consciousness as well as subconsciousness, Jesus. I went on t...

  Arun Krishnamurthy [from Time] There are too many armchair critics like me in the world. We sit and grumble when things don’t work as they should. At the most, we write blogs and draw attention to the problems. We don’t do anything much to solve the problem. Actions speak louder than words but actions aren’t easy. So anyone who actually performs some meaningful action in this absurd world becomes a hero for me. Let me present one such hero today. Arun Krishnamurthy is a 36-year-old young man from Chennai who was worried about India’s progress and development. Since 2000, when Krishnamurthy was an adolescent boy, India has changed significantly. The population grew by nearly a third. The country’s economy quintupled. Both these booms have put immense pressure on the country’s natural areas, Krishnamurthy realised. For example, more than 70% of surface water in the country is polluted. Poor management of industrial and domestic waste is the chief cause. Another problem that worr...

Book Review Title: My Name is Not Devdas Author: Aayush Gupta Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2022 Pages: 155 The original Devdas story was written a century ago when the world was quite different. In today’s post-truth world, where nationalism and many other similar isms are nothing more than political gimmicks, where every slogan has an equally engrossing anti-slogan, and where love is little more than veiled selfishness, old-style romance has no place. Love becomes all the more an alien thing on the campuses in the country’s overly political capital city. Aayush Gupta’s slim novel is set in Delhi and most of the story unfolds on the campuses of Delhi University and the Jamia Milia. In the background, we can hear the slogans of both the nationalists and the anti-nationalists: Goli maaro saalon ko! and Azaadi! Azaadi! The 21 st -century Devdas, Paro and Chandramukhi belong there on those campuses. Devdas came to Delhi from Kolkata where his father, Professor Narayan ...

  I was in a friend’s (let’s call him Alex) house when an elderly woman rang his doorbell. She introduced herself as a member of a popular religious cult. She wished to talk to Alex and his family for a while. “My family is not here,” Alex said. “Wife is in office and children are working in faraway places and they come home once in a month or so.” So she decided to counsel Alex. “Do you go to church every Sunday?” “Yeah,” Alex said and I blinked at him. The last time he went to church must have been for his grandson’s baptism half a decade ago. Alex went on to give the answers that the woman wanted and most of them were obviously lies. The woman might want to recommend him to the Pope as a living saint after hearing his answers. “We are such a godless people now,” Alex told the woman very sanctimoniously. “Look at the graphs of crime rates, alcoholism, drug abuse, and so on. If all people went to church every day and prayed three times a day and had fear of God in thei...

  From the Buddha The Buddha and his disciples were walking along when they came to a river. The water was too deep for many people to wade across. ‘It’s less than neck-deep,’ Buddha said. ‘We can manage.’ It is then that they saw a young woman waiting helplessly on the bank. She was too scared to wade across. Could they help her? ‘Can you sit on my shoulders? I’ll take you across.’ She was more than happy. She had to get across one way or another. They crossed the river with the young woman on Buddha’s shoulders. Nobody uttered a word. Was there a feeling in the air that something repugnant was being carried out? The woman thanked Buddha as he left her on the other bank and went her way. The Buddha and the disciples continued to walk in silence. Something didn’t sound quite right. There was no sound, of course. Silence can be ominous sometimes. Finally one of the young disciples broke that silence. ‘Master, was it right for you to carry that woman on your shoulders?’ ...