Tomichan Matheikal's blog

When The Satanic Verses went about kicking up more dust and storm than a (commercial) publication could afford to, Salman Rushdie, the author, wrote many an article about freedom of expression.       In one such article he argued that the freedom of expression necessarily implies the freedom to hurt feelings.   Otherwise it wouldn’t be freedom.   And he’s right.   More or less at the same time he wrote another article titled “Is nothing sacred?”   For him, said the article, only bread and books are sacred: food for the body as well as the mind. Sanctity is almost always an attribute; it is attributed by us human beings to certain entities.   There are 330 million gods in India.   Apart from them we have rivers, mountains, caves, trees, and umpteen other things which are supposed to be sacred.   Is India sacred?   If it is, which India is it?   Is it the India represented by the Parliament (the elected leaders)?   Is it the Constitution of the country?   Is it the national symb

I’m quite convinced that I am a Romantic.   The last of the Romantic poets (William Wordsworth) died in 1850.   He was the first of them, in fact.   Yet I call him the last simply because he lived longer than the others. Most of the Romantic poets died young.   P B Shelley lived 30 years.   John Keats died at the age of 26.   Byron managed to make it to 36.   I often wondered why they died so young.   One of the books of Will Durant told me a few years ago that the Romantics died young because they dreamed too big. Durant was not a literary critic.   Literary critics are not supposed to look at the biographies of writers; they are only supposed to analyse the written discourses.   Durant was a philosopher and so he was free to look at the biography (just as he would have been free to look at anything else).   He thought that the Romantics died young because the world they dreamt of could never be materialised. The Romantics tried to run away from the society, from the city, f

The recent disaster in Sivakasi is not an exception.   Not a single year passes without similar disasters in the cracker-village called Sivakasi in Tamil Nadu.   Right now there are about 3000 living martyrs in and around Sivakasi who inherited burn injuries from the disasters and were rendered impotent for living normal life.   The hundreds who sacrificed their lives to the industry and the delight it gives to Diwali-celebrating Indians as well as the profit-reaping industrialists are always forgotten history. The crackers industry makes an annual turnover of about Rs800-1000 crore.   But the worker in the industry gets a daily wage of Rs100 to Rs200.   The industry employs about 40,000 workers directly and 100,000 indirectly (ancillary jobs that cater to the needs of the labourers).    Two questions arise. 1.       Is the industry required at all? 2.       How to find alternative employment for the workers who depend on the industry? The second question is not likely to