Tomichan Matheikal's blog

  Fiction “Bombs are the strategies employed by people who reach their level of incompetence,” said Shyamsunder to his son, Manvender. “Why did people explode bombs near where Modi was speaking?” The 14 year-old Manvender had asked. “... and incompetence is reciprocal,” Shyamsunder went on.  “Modi had exploded some bombs about a decade ago.  They are now coming back to him.” Shyamsunder was running a coaching institute for IIT aspirants (“and also for ordinary students,” he would add with a sly smile) in Patna.  He had a been a computer programmer for a while in a private firm in Delhi.  He had to leave when the director of the firm, Mr Ram Kumar, had risen to his level of incompetence.  According to the Peter Principle, the corporate sector gives promotions to the staff until they reach a position whose demands turn out to be beyond their competence.  Incompetence gives birth to manipulations. “Management is not possible without some manipulation,” Mr Ram Kum

Short Fiction   Sculptor was frustrated.   He had a theory that every rock contained within it the statue which the artist has only to discover.  Sculpture is the art of dis-covering.  But the rock on which he was working refused to reveal the statue it contained.  Sculptor looked at his semi-finished statue from left and right, front and back, from all angles possible.  No, this isn’t what I had seen in the rock.  Yes, a sudden realisation dawned on him.  I’ve been making a mistake.  I had seen a particular statue in the rock while the rock contained a quite different one.   He took his hammer and chisel again.  In the place of Sita which he had been trying to carve, now emerged Ravana.  With one face containing all the ten faces. 

If Mr Narendra Modi’s admiration for Sardar Patel is born of a genuine understanding of the latter, his Statue of Unity project merits the nation’s approval.  Modi has decided to spend an estimated sum of Rs 2500 crore to erect Patel’s statue in the Narmada.  Cynics and Modi’s critics will thumb their noses at the expenditure incurred at a time when a large number of people in Modi’s state are labouring under the burden of day-to-day subsistence. But Shahjahan would not have built the Taj Mahal had he applied this kind of logic to his historical aspirations.  India would have missed one of the world’s wonders.  Modi is the contemporary Shahjahan giving us the world’s tallest statue. Is Modi merely a modern day Shahjahan trying to engrave his name indelibly in the annuls of history?  Or is he playing yet another political game to add a new avatar to the already overcrowded pantheon of the Sangh Parivar?  Does Modi know what the Sardar really was, how diametrically op

Husband came home jubilantly because he had managed to get a kilogram of onions at half the market price, thanks to Sheila didi. “Rotten,” said Wife in her characteristic laconic way after opening the precious packet of onions. “Really?”  Husband was agitated.  Agitation was his characteristic way.  “How could the government sell onions at half the market price?  It has to be rotten.  No dealer will sell onions at that rate even to the government in these days when governments are dictated to by traders.  The question is why the media didn’t pick it up.” “See this,” said Wife.  She showed him the front page report on his favourite newspaper, The Hindu , which said, “Delhiites say Govt selling ‘rotten’ onions”.  No wonder there was no rush for onions today, mused Husband who would not have bought the onions otherwise.  But he had to justify himself before Wife.  So he said, “I wonder why the media doesn’t pursue the matter beyond the obvious.  For example, where

Book Review Barry Fairbrother dies giving rise to a vacancy in the Parish council.  There are many aspirants for the vacant post.  J K Rowling’s novel, The Casual Vacancy , is partly about the struggles of the aspirants to materialise their dream.  The novel is more about such social issues as juvenile aberration, pornography, drug addiction, and child abuse.  The novel presents a terribly bleak and partly frivolous world.  Linguistic obscenity hangs heavily on the reader’s mind as he/she turns pages hoping to see some light at the end of the tunnel.  But all that you will get is more and more darkness.  Rowling is writing about a society that shrugs at revelations of evil.  A character in the novel, the adolescent Stuart “Fats” Wall, tries to defeat his father in the Parish council election by hacking into the council’s website and posting a report that his father was a thief, only to realise that “the world, it seemed, had merely shrugged.  Evil is a natural concomitant

“We have all learned most of what we know outside school.  Pupils do most of their learning without, and often despite, their teachers.” I don’t know how many people will agree with the statements above.  Ivan Illich wrote that 4 decades ago in his deservedly celebrated book, Deschooling Society .  He argued that “Everyone learns how to live outside school.  We learn to speak, to think, to love, to feel, to play, to curse, to politick and to work without interference from a teacher.  Even children who are under a teacher’s care day and night are no exception to the rule.” I am a teacher who has been working in an exclusively residential school for over a decade.  I won’t disagree with Illich. Of late, my mind which is normally logical is flooded with fantasies.  The fantasies are all about a dream school that I would like to open.  A school where children will be free to bloom without constraints imposed by systems.  Play, sleep, eat, and let children do what

“Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things,” said Management guru, Peter Drucker.  Many institutions as well as nations have gone down the tunnel of damnation merely due to lack of good leadership, though their management was good.  Doing things right is not a guarantee that one is doing the right things.  When the Jews wanted to stone the adulteress to death, they were doing things right.  When Jesus told them, “Let him who has not sinned cast the first stone,” he was doing the right thing.  [John 8:1-11] The Hindu newspaper today [22 Oct] carries a review of Maya Tudor’s book, The Promise of Power: The Origins of Democracy in India and Autocracy in Pakistan.   Both India and Pakistan had the same origins: a British colony.  Yet India became a democracy that empowered the people and Pakistan became a theocracy which enervated its citizens.   Why did it happen? The answer lies in the difference between the Congress Party and the Musl