Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Book Review Title     : Swaraj Author : Arvind Kejriwal Publisher         : Harper Collins India & India Today Group, 2012 Pages               : 151                            Rs. 150 Arvind Kejriwal is driven by his passion to sweep clean the Indian political system.  His book, Swaraj , is redolent of that passion from the first page to the last.  The book, claims Anna Hazare on the front cover, “is a manifesto for our times and for the anti-corruption movement...” In fact, the book may be seen as a manifesto of Kejriwal’s Aam Admi Party whose election symbol is the broom. The book reads like a pamphlet written by a puritan mind seized with the zeal for political reformation.  The tone is very demagogic and self-righteous.  Examples are taken randomly from here and there to substantiate arguments without giving certain necessary details like the names of people or firms involved.  There is only one central argument in the book: power should be given to

Vision is one of my few obsessions.   I’m slow to see and understand things that matter for worldly success.  That’s why I had to visit my ophthalmologist after my duty at school today.  I had lost my spectacles in the Arabian Ocean while playing with my students at Calangute beach in Goa the other day during a tour from school.  My ophthalmologist is an organisation: Venu Eye Institute & Research Centre in Delhi.  There is no single individual who relates to you personally in that institute.  Yet every employee is a paragon of politeness.  Every patient feels like a VIP in that institute.  I was escorted, like any other patient, from the reception to the hall where I had to wait for the first examination.  (And I was escorted similarly from room to room thereafter.) I had made it very clear that I just wanted to get a new pair of spectacles with the right powers of the lenses.  But my ophthalmologist (the hospital which is a charitable institution that charges merely Rs

Standing on the elevated viewpoint of the Dona Paula beach in Goa, surrounded by hundreds of tourists, I felt lonely.  There are so many people, people and people, and yet not many whom we can hug and say, “I love you.”  People jostled each other all around me.  I was watching the solitary figure in the sea far below the elevated viewpoint.  A boy (or a grown up man, I couldn’t be sure) was catching fish standing on a rock in the sea.  He waited and waited.  A long time passed.  I waited and watched.  For a fish to bite the bait.  I had to leave the boy and the beach heeding the call of my duty; I am a fish that is inescapably hooked to a bait.  The boy’s image continues to haunt my imagination.  Aren’t most of us similar to that solitary figure, I wonder.  There are people and people all around.  Yet we are alone! I was one of the four teachers who took a group of students on a tour of Mumbai and Goa.  Goa fascinated me with its laid back appearance.  It appea