Tomichan Matheikal's blog

The day ended on a sour note. I was at school. The school that I had retired from a few months back had called me back when my successor had to leave without notice for his own valid reasons. I was filling a vacuum, in short. I could sense something alien from the moment I stepped into the school. I felt like an unwanted guest. You shouldn’t return to a place from where you retired and got a grand farewell. Was that the feeling in the air? I think so. You should never return to your own vacuum. Retirement is like death. The farewell is the funeral. You shouldn’t challenge death. Least of all, your funeral. Last life’s words belong to last life’s language, if I may paraphrase T S Eliot. You need to invent the words for your new life that’s a potential threat to many who were trying to create a new lingo that has no word for you in its lexicon. You shouldn’t return to certain places ever. The classrooms weren’t as bad, however. The students are ready to try you out. Old wine can be

  Floppy Disks Japan was probably the only country that retained the floppy disk on their computers so long. Now that country has decided to say goodbye to the floppy drive and the disk. Most people of the present young generation may not even have seen the floppy disk. When I bought my first computer, a desktop that took up quite a lot of space in the room, the floppy disk was the only way to copy data and store it or transfer it. The disk couldn’t keep much data either. I remember using floppy disks that could contain hardly 1.44 MB of data. Very often these disks would get infected either by virus or by the weather. It couldn’t withstand humidity or the heat of Delhi’s summer. It was absolutely unreliable, in short. Soon came compact disks or CDs which were far superior to the floppy disks. But copying anything on to the CD was a Herculean task which I never managed to master. It had the tremendous (tremendous in those days) capacity to hold 700 MB of data. When I got my fir

  AI-generated illustration Shashi Tharoor described India the other day as a democratically elected dictatorship. He was speaking about the imminent arrest of Arundhati Roy for her remark on Kashmir. I don’t question Tharoor’s description because it’s true. In spite of the thrashing received in the last elections, Narendra Modi has refused to change his style of governing the country. He still thinks he has a divine mandate to rule India as per his whims and fancies. I have been more inclined to view the Modi government as a humongous extortionist. GST is the simple reason. Modi’s government has been collecting unjustifiable amounts in the name of GST. Let me give only a couple of personal examples. The other day I received a notification from my health insurers. It’s time to renew my policy if I wish to continue its benefits. The company doesn’t seem quite eager to have me continue it. My agent tells me that once a client turns 65, medical insurance business loses interest in t

I stood face to face with Ruskin Bond. He had his characteristic genial smile on his face. My face must have revealed a helpless inhibition which held me back from going to him and the simultaneous desire to go to him and say a Hi at least. I would have loved to have a conversation with him, however brief. That was in 2003. I had taken a student of mine from school for an award ceremony organised by ITC at the ITC Hotel in Mumbai. My student was one of the 15 prize-winners of a short story competition conducted by ITC and their newly launched brand of student-oriented products named Classmate . The awards were being presented by Ruskin Bond who would also release the story anthology. My student who won the award was a fan of Ruskin Bond. But he did not seem the least interested in meeting his favourite writer personally and getting an autograph. He was with the other prize-winners who were all imprinting autographs on one another’s white T-shirts presented to them by ITC and whic

Fiction D riving is what I do when I want to get away from. From what? From whom? Well, you see, I’m sort of an escapist. I would get away from anything. From my job that I am incredibly passionate about. From my home which is the only paradise I can ever afford. From my wife, whom I love a lot and who loves me even more. Well, you know, I’m that sort of a disgruntled old man who is unable to shed his narcissism in spite of all the bangs and bashes it has received for decades from well-meaning self-righteous religious people. I suppose you must have understood by now what kind of a man I am. I am old. I am disgruntled according to those around me especially the religious sort of people. And, if you ask me, I don’t really care for other people which means I should be an ascetic. I get overwhelmed, rarely though, by a desire to know what lies beneath the banality and morbidity of human life. That is what asceticism is about, I guess. My wife thinks I’m a bit cranky and hence sh

  Hasina Kharbhih, image from the website of her NGO As I was reading Ashish Kundra’s book, A Resurgent Northeast: Narratives of Change , the name of Hasina Kharbhih caught my attention. It didn’t take me much time to verify that it was the same Hasina whom I taught in high school back in the late 1980s. This is what Kundra says about her: Sexual exploitation of urban migrants pushed seventeen-year-old Hasina Kharbhih to start the Impulse NGO Network in Meghalaya. She offers a contrarian view of the skilling programme run by the government. ‘Skill India turned our rural youth into labourers,’ she fumes. She pledged to stem the tide of migration of rural women by leveraging an exclusive source of strength of the region: handlooms. Over the years, she has created a network of 30,000 artisans…. A Fulbright scholar, Hasina’s work has won her many accolades and awards. I had read about Hasina a few years back in the magazine, Down To Earth . Kundra’s book gave me more information abo

Book  Title: Up Against Darkness Author: Medha Deshmukh Bhaskaran Publisher: Sakal Media, Pune, 2023 Pages: 295 According to an estimate by the National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO), there are over eight lakh women sex workers in India. A good many of them are treated as worse than animals. This book, Up Against Darkness , is a detailed study on the red-light areas of Ahmednagar in Maharashtra. The book highlights the phenomenal service rendered by Dr Girish Kulkarni and his wife Prajakta for the sex workers of Ahmednagar. As a boy in school, Girish was restless and full of energy. “He became unruly in class, troubling the teachers and other school children.” The neighbours too had to bear the brunt of his mischiefs. When Girish saw a sex worker smacking her little son in order to get him out of her client’s way, his heart melted. He was a young college student then. He volunteered to take care of the little boy and eventually he became an apostle of the sex workers in