Tomichan Matheikal's blog

From CNN  whose headline is:  Holy cow! India is the world's largest beef exporter The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon is perhaps the only novel I’ve read in which food plays a significant, though not central, role, particularly in deepening the reader’s understanding of Christopher Boone’s character. Christopher, the protagonist, is a 15-year-old autistic boy. [For my earlier posts on the novel, click here .] First of all, food is a symbol of order and control in the novel. Christopher’s relationship with food is governed by strict rules and routines. He likes certain foods and detests a few others. “I do not like yellow things or brown things and I do not eat yellow or brown things,” he tells us innocently. He has made up some of these likes and dislikes in order to bring some sort of order and predictability in a world that is very confusing for him. The boy’s food preferences are tied to his emotional state. If he is served a breakfast o...

When fellow blogger Sakshi Varma invited me join a blog-hop on the theme of disability, in connection with the International Day of Persons with Disabilities [IDPD, 3 Dec], the first person who came to my mind was Christopher Boone. Before I come to Christopher, let me tell you about Augustin (not his real name), who was my classmate in high school. Augustin’s right leg had been rendered limp due to polio in childhood. But his greatest passion was football. During the games period, he would be there on the football ground, running around as much as he could, in passionate exuberance, shouting to others what they should do, though he hardly got an opportunity to touch the ball. Whenever there was a football match, Augustin would be there on the side of the ground, holding on to the branch of a tree firmly, watching the game, with his limp leg flying in the air as if he was kicking the ball. He was engrossed totally in the game. I loved watching him rather than the game. His passion...

  “Prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.” The narrator-protagonist of Mark Haddon’s novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time , makes that captivating observation. 15-year-old Christopher loves numbers and has a way with them. For example, ask him ‘What’s 251 times 864?’ and he’ll tell you in a moment the answer: 216,864. It’s easy, he will tell you, you just multiply 864 x 1000 which is 864,000. Then you divide it by 4 which is 216,000 and that’s 250 x 864. Then you just add another 864 on to it to get 251 x 864. And that’s 216,864. He’s good at science too. What he’s not good at is understanding people. People are more complicated than maths and science. They tell lies. They have complex emotions and motives. And beliefs. Christopher tells us that he cannot tell lies, ‘not because I am a good person. It is because I can’t tell lies.’ His mind is too logic...