Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Material success and career advancement need not necessarily bring happiness.  Genuine happiness radiates from the core of one’s heart.  It implies that one should discover it at the core of one’s heart.  Possessions and achievements have little to do with real contentment.  They remain at the superficial level of existence.  They boost the ego. Pip, Charles Dickens’ protagonist in the novel Great Expectations (1861), is an example of this great lesson in happiness.  Pip is born in a poor family in the English countryside and he soon loses his parents.  His sister, married to Joe, looks after Pip.  Joe becomes Pip’s foster father.  As a young boy Pip is sent to the house of Miss Havisham to carry out certain works and he is enchanted by the beauty of Estella whom he meets there.  Miss Havisham is an eccentric woman who has c called a halt on her life because the man whom she had loved ditcher her.  She continues to wear her bridal dress, has stopped all the clocks in the h

 Fiction Prabhu’s Apartments was a three storey building on the outskirts of the city.  It housed a dozen families including Prabhu’s own.  The open area in front and on the sides was meant for parking the vehicles of the owners of the flats that Prabhu had constructed and sold.  Prabhu took a personal interest in the welfare of the inmates.  The interest was his passion.  Prabhu was reading an article in the day’s newspaper on women’s empowerment when Raja, the caretaker, announced himself. “There’s a lady who insists on parking her car in our front yard,” said Raja.  He had told the lady time and again that the space was private and meant exclusively for the flat owners.  But she came every week, parked her car in the yard, and walked majestically to the beauty parlour on the other side of the road, without caring two hoots for Raja’s request. Fairness and justice was Prabhu’s predominant passion.  How can people do such a thing?  He asked himself.  How can people j

Religion can make one a devil.  Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel, The Scarlet Letter (1850), shows how. Roger Chillingworth, a sombre scholar, marries a pretty woman, Hester, much younger in age.  During his long absence she develops an affair with Arthur Dimmesdale, a pastor.  When a child is born to Hester in the protracted absence of her husband, she is labelled an adulteress and punished. All this happens in the 17 th century Boston, then a Puritan colony.  The Puritans were a kind of religious fundamentalists.  They followed the letter of the law.  Love, mercy and other such tender feelings had no place in the Puritan worldview.  People should abide by the law at any cost. Hester is punished to wear “the scarlet letter” on her bosom throughout her life.  The letter A, for Adulteress, is emblazoned on her chest, and she has to spend some time on the pillory everyday displaying herself for the edification of the public.   Dimmesdale is struck with guilt feeling