Tomichan Matheikal's blog

One of the many ballads that were made in the pubs of England during Henry VIII’s reign named the King Littleprick, according to Hilary Mantel’s latest [2012] Man Booker Prize-winning novel, Bring Up the Bodies .  There are many places in the novel where Henry’s sexual potency or the size of his genital organ is called into question.  In a way, the novel is about the King’s lack of “skill” and “vigour” in copulation.  Is it some psychological complex about his sexual skills or the size of his penis that drove Henry to marry six times?  Well, Anne Boleyn was his second wife, and the present novel tells the story of the King’s and many other men’s affairs with her.  Maybe, in the next volume of the series, Mantel will explore this theme further.  Maybe not.  Mantel’s real interests lie in Thomas Cromwell who is the indirect narrator of both the first two volumes and promises to continue that job in the next one too.  Wolf Hall , the first volume in the series, ends with Henry

The Buddha, Jesus and Mahatma Gandhi are three persons whom I found myself admiring as I grew older though not proportionately wiser.  I don’t share their great qualities, feeble as I am.  In fact, I may find myself towards the middle of the spectrum if we construct such a continuum of human qualities and personality traits as the one envisaged by philosopher Spinoza.  Is what another philosopher, Nietzsche, said of himself true for me too: “What I am not, that for me is God and virtue” [in Thus Spoke Zarathustra ]? If I apply Spinoza’s classification, these three luminaries whom I have grown to admire belong to the category of people who regarded love as the primary virtue, considered all people to be equally precious, and resisted evil by returning good.  Spinoza argued that people like Jesus and Buddha constructed an ethical system that stressed feminine virtues.  At the other end of that spectrum are people like Machiavelli and Nietzsche [and most administrators I’ve b

I’m getting increasingly convinced that Delhi can only rape.  Ms Sheila Dikshit can shed crocodile tears on the umpteen TV channels to which she condescended to give interviews after the most recent and most publicised gang rape.  I watched her on Times Now, NDTV, and CNN.  She might have given interviews to many other channels too.  She looked like a wax statue that one sees at madametussauds .  That look may be a  gift of current international politics, I grant.   Buy and Sell kind of international politics.  Use and Throw kind of politics. This Buy and Sell+ Use and Throw is what I learnt about as I was on a routine duty today.  I cannot mention the duty and the place as well as the people involved because of the oath of secrecy that even a stupid school teacher has to take these days. The duty brought a Delhi policeman face to face with me.  As we waited wasting our time as demanded by our duties [his as a policeman and mine as a school teacher], he asked me what