Tomichan Matheikal's blog

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation

Book Review Title: From Manjunath to Manjamma Authors: B Manjamma Jogathi with Harsha Bhat Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2023 Pages: 171 I had an aversion towards the transgender people I met on the trains during my frequent travels as a younger man. These people came across as rude and vulgar. They would enter the train compartment in a large group, clapping hands loudly, waking up sleeping passengers and insisting on being given generous alms. They would go to the extent of hectoring the passengers, even making physical intrusions like poking and caressing body parts that we won’t let strangers touch. Reading Arundhati Roy’s novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness , a few years ago, made me look at transpersons with some empathy. Anjum, the transperson protagonist, is also a Muslim. Double alienation. Anjum is an undesirable citizen of the country by virtue of being a transperson who is also a Muslim. She is pushed out of the mainstream literally and driven to living i

Anjana Alphons George I wanted this to be a guest post from a former student. However, getting this poem from Anjana Alphons George wasn’t quite easy. So this is going to be a hybrid of the guest and the host coming together like the waves and the intertidal zone in the ocean. “I’ve become your fan,” I said to Anjana. She was in grade 10. I wasn’t teaching her since my classes were confined to grades 11 and 12. It was a few years back. Anjana had delivered a speech in the weekly morning assembly. Her speech was entirely different from all the speeches of students I had ever listened to. It sounded impromptu. It carried feelings from the heart. Convictions, rather. It was motivational. Inspiring. It moved goosebumps on my skin. “Your speech was splendid,” I told her when I met her on the corridor later in the day. She became my student in grades 11 and 12 and I watched her grow up into intellectual and emotional maturity. When I asked her to write a guest post on my blog, I ha

Book Review I read this book purely by chance. R K Narayan is not a writer whom I would choose for any reason whatever. He is too simple, simplistic. I was at school on Saturday last and I suddenly found myself without anything to do though I was on duty. Some duties are like that: like a traffic policeman’s duty on a road without any traffic! So I went up to the school library and picked up a book which looked clean. It happened to be Waiting for the Mahatma by R K Narayan. A small book of 200 pages which I almost finished reading on the same day. The novel was originally published in 1955, written probably as a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi and India’s struggle for independence. The edition that I read is a later reprint by Penguin Classics. Twenty-year-old Sriram is the protagonist though Gandhi towers above everybody else in the novel just as he did in India of the independence-struggle years. Sriram who lives with his grandmother inherits significant wealth when he turns 20. Hi

“Do we need a government at all?” That was my introductory question in a class on Vikram Seth’s poem The Tale of Melon City . I intended to provoke my self-conceited students into some shape of wokeness. The only time their consciousness seems to awake is when they can detect some error in my pronunciation because a few of these students lived in some English-speaking country including America for a brief period and hence think they know English better than anyone in India. Interestingly, every time they question my pronunciation, I google it and prove to them that I am right. My ego! The class becomes a battleground of egos in spite of my age. I am a middling sexagenarian. So, one day I decided to put an end to the ego battle and apologised to my students for being their teacher. I didn’t deserve to be their teacher, I told them. Forgive me for the grave error of having accepted the offer from the school management to teach you. Just a few more weeks. I cannot dishonour the contra

Book Review   Title: Gandhi: A Life in Three Campaigns Author: M J Akbar Publisher: Bloomsbury, 2023 Pages: 250 You can love this man or hate him, but you cannot ignore him. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi is the man, aka the Mahatma. The amount of hatred that is spewed on social media day after day, after Mr Modi became the Prime Minister of India, is simply stounding. Right now there is a social media campaign going on to get Mahatma Gandhi’s picture removed from the country’s currency notes. It is possible that Narendra Modi’s picture will replace the Mahatma’s sooner than any sane Indian would expect. In such a context, yet another biography of the Mahatma is not out of place. This biography is written by a man who was inducted into the Union Council of Ministers by no less a personage than Narendra Modi himself. M J Akbar was an eminent journalist before he chose to join Modi’s cabinet for reasons known only to him. The regal association ended when a charge of sexual ha

Festivals ceased to charm me once I grew out of childhood. Crowds are the souls of festivals and I detest crowds. A crowd doesn’t have a mind. It is a leviathan full of passion and energy. All brawn and no brain. All too often I am driven to the conclusion that festivals are so popular precisely because they don’t require anyone to think anything worthwhile and people don’t like to think. There is one festival, however, that I have always looked forward to with good cheer. Onam. Onam is a fairly long festival. The celebrations run over weeks. Flowers and music are the souls of this festival. No pollutions. Kerala and its people celebrated Onam just a month back with all its traditional art, music and cultural richness. Pookkalam (floral rangoli) is the first thing that will come to the mind of anyone who has seen Onam celebrations. It is an intricate floral design assumed to be a colourful and gentle carpet meant to welcome Mahabali, the hero of Onam. More about him later. Boa