Tomichan Matheikal's blog

"Acting wholeheartedly with wisdom means appreciating the relationships and interactions between ourselves and others," say Joseph O'Connor and John Seymour in their book on NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming).  (The above illustration is taken from that book.)  You can't really conquer peaks of success all alone simply because everything around you is linked to you.  With an invisible string.   When you think you are conquering the peak alone, with no rival beneath you because the sole rival in sight is about to fall off, remember that his fall may mean your fall too.   Why do people actually want to push others down to the bottom?   Helplessness, I think.  Inability to manage others.  Sheer inability.   Weakness makes us aggressive? But is it only weakness?  Can aggression be fun? I was watching a young boy playing a race game on computer.  Whenever he came across a rival in the game he would do something like hit the rival on his

Riding around in Delhi on a rickety scooter is one of my few hobbies.  It gives me a feel of earthiness, a feeling that I am a nobody amidst the costly cars that fly by me.  It makes me feel humble, arrogant as I am.  It helps me to check my dreams.  It roots me in reality, the harsh reality that I like to confront honestly. A traffic policeman stopped me today.  I took off my helmet with a smile that comes rather artificially to me these days. “I’ve broken the law, you can punish me,” I said.  I think the smile had not vanished from my cheeks.   I had jumped a red light.  I had not intended it.  My scooter got stuck on the gravel and the lights turned red before I could cross the range.  This was the first time that I was ever caught in my 12 years of hobbying in Delhi by the omnipresent traffic police of Delhi.  “License?” asked the policeman. I handed him my licence. “... school ...,” he read it aloud for the benefit of his senior officer who was standin

Historical Fiction “I’m going to die,” declared Diogenes.  He was 96.  By the time you reach the age of 96 you will have acquired the wisdom to know when to die.  You can have such wisdom even earlier.  Depends on what life taught you.  Rather what you cared to learn from life. Diogenes was on a street in Corinth.  Dying.  The street was his home.  When the weather was too good outside he chose to get into a barrel.  Somebody had gifted him that barrel.  Why somebody?  Greece was mad enough to understand the madness of Diogenes and appreciate it.  But Greece was not so mad that Diogenes was prompted to declare with the certainty that comes only to godmen that “Most men are within a finger’s breadth of being mad.” “It takes a wise man to discover a wise man,” declared Diogenes with the same godman-certainty when Xeniades of Corinth bought him from the slave dump.  He had been sold as a slave by one of the administrators of Greece who wished to get rid of his ravi

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