Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Christians all over the world are entering the Holy Week, a week dedicated to the commemoration of the last days of Jesus which led to his crucifixion and the putative resurrection.   Though I lost my religious faith three decades ago my interest in Jesus has refused to make a clean exit from my consciousness.   Probably my debilitatingly conservative Catholic upbringing has nailed Jesus too fast to my consciousness. Who was Jesus in reality?   This is a question that has fascinated me much.   I don’t believe he was the son of God.   I don’t believe there is any God up there or anywhere else begetting sons or daughters or any other miserable creatures.   I find it quite interesting that we, the human beings, who have explored the minute world of the subatomic particles and the stars billions of kilometres away, have not been able to discover much about a person who lived merely 2000 years ago.   Did he exist at all?   I remember a book which was quite a craze among a few of m

“Formative Assessment is a tool used by the teacher to continuously monitor student progress in a non threatening, supportive environment,” says CBSE’s manual on CCE (Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation – which is understood by many students as ‘ Continuous and Carefree Entertainment ).  “Non-threatening and supportive” – that’s what the assessment is supposed to be when a teacher does it in the class.  What about the assessment carried out by the Board at the end of the session? See the remark written by one of the CBSE students on the Board’s complaint board after yesterday’s math exam of class 12: MATHEMATICS WAS F**K**G TOUGH THE 2013 CBSE EXAM WAS F**K**G TOUGH TO WRITE!! :( I DINT EXPECT THIS TPYE OF MATHEMATICS PAPER EVER :( CBSE IS HARDCORE i should have tried some thing else,, wasted 2 years of my high schools in CBSE :( It is written by a student who calls him-/herself maha dewayz . There are quite a few other students too who have compl

Book Review Title:    Red Poppies : An epic saga of old Tibet           Author:  Alai Translated from Chinese by Howard Goldblatt & Sylvia Li-chun Lin Publisher: Penguin, 2002 Pages: 416 “Yes, all I wanted was to be a chieftain; I’d never given any serious thought to what I wanted to do.  So I tried hard to imagine what I’d get by becoming a chieftain.  Silver?  Women?  Vast territory?  Numerous servants?  I had all those without even trying.  Power?  Yes, power.  But it wasn’t as if I didn’t have any now.  Besides, power could get me only more silver, more women, vaster territory, and more servants.  Which was to say, being chieftain didn’t mean much to me.  But strangely, I still wanted it.” One of the biggest paradoxes of human life is that a lot of effort is expended on a lot of enterprises which really don’t make our life any better.  We endure so many struggles and overcome so many hurdles, pull down apparent rivals and prop up convenient collaborators, s