Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Durga Vahini, reportedly a women's wing of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, is objecting to the art exhibition going on at Delhi Art Gallery.  The current Durgas think that the paintings on display in the Gallery demean women. Below is one of the paintings/sculptures exhibited at the gallery. And below is one of the sculptures from Khajuraho temple. When are the Durgas going to demolish the Khajuraho temple, the sculptures in Ajanta and Ellora caves, and many other works of art belonging to the country's past which is usually glorified in our history books?

Courtesy the Internet Dr Gerald Crabtree of Stanford University has hypothesised that the human mind has begun to lose its intellectual and emotional abilities.  Since Dr Crabtree’s essays are only available online for a price that I cannot now afford, I’ve decided to be content with this little information handed out by Manoj Das in his article, Are we facing an evolutionary crisis? in the Sunday magazine of The Hindu [3 Feb 2013].  I’m particularly fascinated by the scientist’s hypothesis that deep within man a hitherto ignored constituent of consciousness is demanding recognition. As a teacher and a voracious reader of serious books (boastfulness not intended), I’m slightly scandalised by what I see around in relation to man’s apparently declining “intellectual and emotional abilities.”  If I ask my students to read a book for a project, they go online and get a summary of the book instead of reading the book itself.  I tried a variation.  I asked them to read o

An individual’s behaviour (“strategic conduct,” to be more precise, as phrased by Anthony Giddens, sociologist) is based largely on how s/he interprets his/her environment, or the reality around.  But what is reality? How real is my laptop?  The ancient Greek philosopher (to start with our ancestral wisdom) Plato would say that the idea of the laptop is more real and this particular laptop. Ideas are more real for Plato than particular concrete things. Modern science will tell me about the various components that make up my laptop which in turn are made up of atoms which consist of subatomic particles which are made up of more fundamental particles!  Which among all these is real? This post is a sort of continuation of my previous one titled Truth is Beauty .  I think we cannot speak of truth unless we tackle the issue of reality. People see reality differently.  Hence truth too varies according to people.  For most people the scientific world of atoms and suba