Tomichan Matheikal's blog

With two students Today [Sep 5] is Teacher’s Day in India. India is a country whose cultural tradition placed the teacher on a par with none less than god. “Acharya devobhava,” said Dattatreya Upanishad. The time has changed. Covid-19 changed it, I must say. Before the pandemic placed the omnipotent smartphone in the hands of students for online classes, the teacher commanded much respect from students. Not anymore. Now the student may know more than the teacher. I may speak about Dostoevsky eloquently but my student will teach me even more eloquently about Korean movies. I belong to an old world whose value systems were entirely different from today’s. Value systems. There lies the point. Is there any value system left anymore? We live in a country whose government seems to have legalised all kinds of violence [e.g., from Gujarat 2002 to Manipur 2023], frauds [e.g., innumerable sublime slogans and the opposite reality – Beti bachao beti padhao , etc], blatant misuse of religion ...

Kingini Kingini has a story to tell though she is only a kitten still, less than 4 months old. She was born in a hole on the wall of a land terrace far away from all human presence. Her mother (whom Maggie named Kiki because whenever she was hungry she came outside our kitchen and produced a feeble noise, ‘ki-ki’) had had a lot of traumatic experiences earlier. She lost all her kittens in the previous two parturitions. Dogs and humans did that to her, I learnt later. It is from a person who worked in the farms that I came to know about Kiki’s last kittening. “There are two kittens,” the person told me. This person felt pity for them and made the hole as secure from nature’s furies as she could with the help of leaves and twigs. Kiki was a nobody’s cat. She came from somewhere, slept in one house, birthed in another, and ate from our house. Having lost all her kittens two times successively, she chose to give birth this time far away from all hostile elements of the manmade world. ...

From phys.org The sky loves darkness. Dark energy and dark matter constitute 95% of the universe. What we call normal matter is just 5%. It is absurd that 5% becomes normal merely because 95% is mystery. 95% is mystery in the cosmos. How much of me is mystery to you? 95% of you is mystery to me. We didn’t care to know each other. Instead we send rockets to penetrate the mysteries of each other. Innuendos and backbiting and what not. We keep sending satellites into the sky’s mystery. Because we don’t know to appreciate mystery. We can’t let the other be the other. We have to convert the other into ours. One earth, one family, one future. For what? For whom? From Sputnik 1 of 1957, the first artificial earth satellite, to Jan 2022, the earth’s scientists have sent about 5400 satellites into the sky. They are all there revolving round the earth even threatening to cause traffic jam in the space. 3450 of these belong to the most developed country, the USA. They are all flying in ...

BOOKS Title: The Journey Home: An Autobiography of an American Swami Author: Radhanath Swami What is spirituality? This is a question that has bothered me for a long time. It has obviously nothing much to do with religions since religions seem to forge believers into bigots and bombers. I bought this book, written by a man who was born a Jew in Chicago, left home in search of the meaning of life at the age of 19, and became a Hindu Swami at 21, because I thought it would give me some insights into the problem I face with spirituality. The book did enlighten me though in a limited way. Spirituality is a hunger, not of the body but very similar. The spirit, soul or whatever you may call it, is hungry. It is as Saint Augustine of the Catholic Church said, “Our heart is restless until it rests in you.” If there is God, then nothing less can satisfy us merely because nothing else can be as perfect and as delightful and as charming as God. Not everyone experiences such hunger, how...

India is fast losing her forests, thanks to her government. India’s deforestation rose from 384,000 hectares in the ten years between 1990 and 2000 to 668,000 hectares in five years between 2015 and 2020. How do you get a few thousands of those hectares of forests? You have to be a friend of the central government, in the first place. Then you need to conjure up some developmental project like oil palm cultivation or ecotourism or something of the sort. That’s almost all. Quite simple. On 4 Aug this year, the Modi government amended the Forest Conservation Act 1980 to make deforestation as easy as bulldozing the houses of certain people in Uttar Pradesh or Haryana. There is no Forest Conservation Act now. What Mr Modi has given the country in its place is Van [Sanrakshan Evam Samvardhan] Adhiniyam. Quite a mouthful, isn’t it? Sounds exotic too. Only, it is – far from being exotic – toxic. This new Adhiniyam [half of Indians won’t understand what that is] narrows the definition ...

Notice that white bag on the left India has taken Lord Shiva to the moon by naming Chandrayan’s landing point after him. Humans have left a lot of other things on the moon too. There is a lot of trash left on the moon by human missions: a whopping 181,000 kg. Quite a bit of that trash consists of what many crewless missions from space-exploring agencies left on the moon over many years. We have left a lot of other stinking waste too: human excreta and urine. There are 96 bags full of human organic waste abandoned on the surface of the moon, mostly by the various missions of NASA. When the first man to land on the moon, Niel Armstrong, was asked what the white bag in some of his lunar photographs was, he was reluctant to answer. But Charles Duke, the Lunar Module pilot of the 1972 mission, admitted candidly that the astronauts could not carry such waste back to the earth for simple logistics reasons. A whole tank of urine and many bags full of solid waste had to be abandoned on the ...

  My copy of Illusions Richard Bach’s novel, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah , was an international bestseller in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It tells the story of Donald Shimoda who was supposed to be a messiah but gave up the mission with the permission of the Infinite Radiant who said to the reluctant messiah, “Not my will, but thine be done. For what is thy will is mine for thee. Go thy way as other men, and be thou happy on the earth.” The fundamental message of the novel is just that: walk your own way and create your happiness. Only you can do that: walking your way and creating your own happiness. It is your duty to do that too. This message is repeated like a motif in different words in the novel. “If God spoke directly to your face and said, ‘I COMMAND THAT YOU BE HAPPY IN THE WORLD, AS LONG AS YOU LIVE,’ what would you do then?” This question is put to the reader right at the beginning. The messiah realises that his teachings and the miracles...