Tomichan Matheikal's blog

“As I grow older, I discard one after another of my masks; but when, having discarded the last, the world sees my unknown features, I doubt whether a single cry of terror will be raised!” This is what Jerome tells his wife Gabrielle in Francois Mauriac’s short story, A Man of Letters . The story is a profound exploration of human love and relationships, particularly conjugal love. Husband-wife relationship demands a lot more understanding and compromises than any other relationship. Living together for years will result in knowing each other too well, warts and all. Can you accept all that you see in your partner? How much compromise are you willing to make? Or, can you rise to the level of God? The narrator of Mauriac’s story says that “It is God’s omniscience that helps Him to endure the sorrows of the world.” If we know everything about a person, we cannot but love him/her. But knowing any person that well is not quite possible. People wear masks to conceal their ugly aspects,

My copy of Great Expectations Charles Dickens does not appear in the list of my favourite novelists, notwithstanding the fact that he is an admirable story-teller. He weaves fantastic plots with too much happening at any time. There are all sorts of characters in his works. There is no dearth of melodrama and sentiments, and even the grotesque. In spite of all that, Dickens remains at a considerable distance from my affections. I think the problem is that his characters become conventional mouthpieces of conventional sentiments when confronted with crises. Pip, the protagonist of Great Expectations , has remained with me for a long time. He has made some sort of an indelible impression on my fancy. His real name is Philip Pirrip but is known as Pip throughout the novel. Right in the first pages of the novel, we meet Pip as a little boy in the local cemetery where his parents are buried. As he is wandering about there, he is caught by “a fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great

Illustration by ChatGPT Evil has a peculiar charm, a charm which seems to belong to an alien world. But somewhere deep in our hearts we know that it is our own world, not an alien world. We romanticise it as Lost Paradise, Rama Rajya, Utopia, or whatever. That ‘romance’ is what I love about Emily Bronte’s novel, Wuthering Heights . Emily died at the age of 29. Most Romantics died young. But those Romantics like Keats and Shelley imagined beautiful worlds and died because their souls knew that such beautiful worlds were impossible. Emily was born just three years before Keats died and four years before Shelley followed Keats. But the literary age was changing to the more prudish Victorian morality as Emily grew up. Victorian morality was more than prudish. Women were supposed to be the western counterparts of India’s Satis, women who immolated themselves on their husbands’ funeral pyres. How could a woman like Emily Bronte, daughter of a Christian parson, born and brought up in a

I realise that I’m becoming utterly lazy these days especially when it comes to writing. Even reading. Earlier, I used to blog almost daily. Then it became an alternate-day affair, then twice a week, and now there’s no order whatever. Similarly, I spend less time on reading too. So, I have decided to give a kick to myself and rouse my spirit up. That’s why I’m joining Blogchatter’s exercise called Half Marathon. It begins tomorrow. Ten posts in 15 days is all what it demands. Fairly easy, if not a child’s game. But the problem is when you’re nearly a burnt-out case. Have you read that novel, by the way: Graham Greene’s A Burnt-Out Case [1961]? It’s worth your time. The novel tells the story of Querry, famous architect, who loses interest in life. He quits and lands in a leper colony in Congo which is looked after by some Catholic missionaries. He is diagnosed by Dr Colin, an atheist doctor, as the medical equivalent of a ‘burnt-out case’: a leper who has gone through the stages

The last of my maternal uncles breathed his last yesterday. A cousin of mine has been tethered to a ventilator today after a fall. The uncle was 93. The cousin must be around 80. I am 64. I have lived twice as long as an average Indian of 1947. When India wrested independence from the British, the average life expectancy of an Indian was 32. Today the average life expectancy in India is 70 years, according to Macrotrends. My uncle, who was a teacher by profession, defied the national statistics. My cousin, who is a nun, is being assisted by one of the innumerable multi-speciality hospitals in Kerala to keep going and defy the national statistics. Would she want to keep going? My inextricable perversion raises that question merely because I have always had a soft corner for her. She is a tender person. Someone who believes that love is the only purpose of human existence. She wouldn’t do anything that would give even the littlest trouble to others. I felt sorry for her when I was

Fiction  She looked so emaciated that I would have mistaken her for a beggar. But she had said, “Hi Tom.” There was no way a beggar would know my name since I was not a politician or any such public figure that appears in the media. Moreover, her dress, a simple but elegant churidar suit, bore the fading shades of some bygone aristocracy. I stared into her eyes, deep and stagnant pools of grief, which reflected a different me, a young me.   “Mercy!” I cried. “Yes,” she said. And she smiled like a moonbeam trying to pierce the winter fog of a terribly polluted city-sky. We were both sitting in a park in the horizon of which the sun was sinking rapidly into the Arabian Ocean beyond the trees in the park. An old man with grey hairs all over his head and face: that’s me. And an old woman with grey hairs that seemed to be lingering on out of some sympathy. That was Mercy. Mercy and I were classmates at college. She was a brilliant student who could solve all the problems of real a

  Quadratic Formula You must have studied the quadratic formula in high school and used it for solving umpteen quadratic equations. Have you ever used it at any time after your school education? How much of what you learnt in school or college has been useful or relevant in your practical life so far? The answer to the first question must be No unless you are a math teacher or in some profession related to math. The answer to the second question must be: Not much. I’m currently a reading a book on education written by Vardan Kabra, cofounder of a reputed school in Gujarat. The book, Reimagining Indian Education , begins with the following pop quiz.  Well, I’m sure you flunked that test. I did too. The only question I could answer correctly was the last one. I could do that because I began my teaching career as a math teacher and I was in love with quadratic equations. Why did we learn what we did at school if 90% of all that stuff never came in handy in our practical life? This i