Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Janus January is named after the Roman god of beginnings and transitions, Janus.  Janus has two faces, one looking backward and the other forward.   January is the time to look in both directions. I am terrified and challenged simultaneously by this January, January 2014.  Because 2013 has been the worst year in my life.  In spite of the fact I am not new to the usual ups and downs of life.  2013 was the year of FACES for me.   MASKS.  I had never seen so many masked faces in my life earlier.  I had never seen smiles that looked angelic but turned out to be diabolic – not even when my students cared to point it out to me.  Not ever to the extent 2013 undressed itself. I saw more than half of my colleagues lose their jobs in 2013.  I witnessed the march of capitalism and religion, hand in hand.  They marched wearing the best saris or the best of cravats available in the market.  They marched on the bones of people they buried beneath the land they acquired in the p

Politics has been nothing more than an entertainment for me.  When the entertainment crossed the most stretched limits of human sensitivity, I wrote blogs to soothe the ruptures within me.  The more I watched the political dramas in my country, the more I began to find it detestable rather than entertaining.   That’s when I chose to stop writing about politics and look at humanity from literary perspectives.  I don’t know whether my choice was an escapist act.  Even Narendra Modi’s acquittal by the Ahmedabad Metropolitan Magistrate would not have prompted me to write a political commentary now.  What has prompted this blog is a question raised by someone with a pseudonym.  He seems to have taken the trouble to follow my blog using Google+ only to raise the question, what do I think of AAP’s coming to power in Delhi?  Similar questions have been raised by a few pseudonymous persons in the recent past and I ignored them.  Perhaps it’s time to tell them that I am bored, utterly

Bottom and Titania in a Multiplex Bottom had walked into the multiplex for window-shopping.  The centralised air-conditioning in the multiplex was a joyful relief from the scorching heat in the city’s overcrowded open spaces.  Moreover, he could gratify his voyeuristic inclination by looking at the legs or cleavages of the pretty fairies that wafted coquettishly around with mobile phones clinging to their ears like earrings and chocobars slipping through their velveteen lips. Though he imagined the girls as fairies Bottom didn’t really believe that fairies existed.  So when he was approached by Titania, the fairy queen herself, his surprise was quite palpable.  But, like most twenty-first century boys (and girls, of course), he knew how to tackle any odd situation in life and so he overcame his surprise sooner than any person from another period of human history would. Titania had just woken up from a sleep.  But her mind was still under the influence of the overdose of the