Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Fiction “MY prayer for today,” he would begin the morning assembly every day with those words. My, I, mine – his vocabulary went little beyond that. “My school,” he was referring to his previous school which was supposed to have some fame because it was situated within a dead king’s renovated fort. And his new school had a living wall, a wall that he constantly built anew by raising its height.  He never felt secure outside a dead king’s fort. “Why did he become a Principal?”  Wondered Manmohan, an average teacher with average brains. “Dead kings’ forts stimulate royal ambitions,” consoled Mrs Manmohan, an average teacher with average brains. The Principal’s favourite team lost the cricket match.  The Principal was furious.  “How can MY team lose?”  He thundered. He galloped towards his car, pulled the door open, sat in the driver’s seat and drove the car backward.  As far as the backward ride was possible. Then he felt at ease. 

“My children, jump, run and play and make all the noise you want but avoid sin like the plague and you will surely gain heaven.”  This is a sentence that I used to hear again and again during my youth.  In those days I was a member of a religious congregation founded by John Bosco (Don Bosco, more famously).  Later I left the congregation because I lost faith in “sin” and a few other religious concepts.  But I still believe that Don Bosco was bang on the point about the rights of children to jump, run and play and make all the noise they want.  Education is not about keeping students quiet in the classroom or even outside.  I have often wondered why children should keep quiet in the dining hall, for example.  Yesterday when a quiz was being conducted in the class (9) in accordance with the activities prescribed in the textbook and recommended highly by CCE (Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation), somebody from the administrative wing rushed into my class saying, “There’s too

Short Story “... people who like to gossip and think the worst always have ways of finding out whatever they want, especially if it’s something negative or there’s some tragedy involved, even if it has nothing to do with them.”  Manmohan stared at the lines again.  The narrator in Javier Marias’s latest novel, The Infatuations , made that statement.  Manmohan loved it.  He put down the book and reflected on the lines.  So true, he said to himself.  Then he wondered why people were so.  The lines became an obsession.  So he decided to take a walk.  Walks were Manmohan’s remedies for obsessions. He was stopped at the gate as usual.  “Who are you?” asked the gate keeper. Manmohan was familiar with that question.  Very familiar.  He heard it every time he had to pass the gate of the residential school where he worked as a teacher.  The school had been taken over by a new management which replaced the entire security staff at the gate with a protean set of new st

Fantasy “Then again, you may pick up just enough education to hate people who say, ‘It’s a secret between he and I.’ Or you may end up in some business office, throwing paper clips at the nearest stenographer.  I just don’t know.  But do you know what I’m driving at, at all?” That’s what a teacher tells a student, the protagonist of J D Salinger’s celebrated novel, The Catcher in the Rye .  Holden, the student, was critical of everything around him.  He was confused by the hypocrisy of the adults around him.  The ability of his companions to adjust to that hypocrisy confounded him further.  In short, life confounded him. Holden ended up in a lunatic asylum.  He couldn’t cope with the confounding life.   But the novel ended when Holden was only 16 years old.  What if Holden continued to live beyond the novel, outside the asylum, liberated from his neurotic obsessions with hypocrisy, and ready to accept the world as it really is? He becomes a teacher in a public s

Book Review Author: David Michie Publisher: Hay House India, 2013 Pages: 216       Price: Rs 399 This is a good book for those who want to have a quick and fairly meaningful peep into Tibetan Buddhism and its current headquarters in Dharamsala and around.  If you are, however, fairly familiar with Buddhism as well as motivational books, this book may disappoint you. In most places the approach of the book is quite simplistic.  Simplicity is an adorable quality; but being simplistic is not.  Look at the Dalai Lama’s advice on anger, for example: “It (anger) is not permanent.  It is not part of you.  You cannot say, ‘I’ve always been an angry person.’  Your anger arises, abides, and passes, just like anyone else’s.  You may experience it more than others.  And each time you give in to it, you feed the habit and make it more likely you will feel it again.  Wouldn’t it be better, instead, to decrease its power?” [p.130] [If you find that advice profound, please

The picture is from the ISKCON site. The cow asked the mosquito, “There’s so much milk in my udder.  Why are you then sucking my blood?” The mosquito grinned at the cow and went on sucking the blood. 

I am still reading David Michie’s book, The Dalai Lama’s Cat .  What is interesting about the book for me is that just when I’m about to surrender myself to the feeling that it is a rehash of some clichéd though noble thoughts, it comes up with a sparkling notion that’s quite out of the way.  Out of the way, for me, that is. The last time I put down the book in order to reflect on one such sparkle was when it spoke about “Other Development.”  Self-development is the dominant theme of most inspirational works, whether it be books, workshops, or counselling sessions.   Helping you realise your potential and thus become a self-actualised person is the goal of such books and sessions.  I too was of the feeling that self-actualisation was the ultimate in the quest for meaning for each individual.   Then came Michie throwing a little pebble into the tranquil pool of my complacence. Self-development is just another quest not very unlike the other usual human quests, suggests Mic