Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Fiction Father Joseph woke up from sleep with a tremor running down his spine.  His body was drenched with sweat.  This had become a routine now: a nightmare would kill his sleep halfway through it. In his nightmares he was a sorcerer, or a witch hunter, or a medieval knight tilting at some mysterious windmills.  He dispensed magical potions and panaceas to the people who came and knelt down in front of him with childlike trust.  He drove a stake into the heart of every sinner in the parish.  He led some amorphous army to he knew not where.  Every dream ended with somebody like John the Baptist making a mocking apparition to him and accusing him of cardinal sins of all hues.  Often the Baptist had only the head; there was no body.  There was fury in his mockery.  His words lashed out like lightning and thunder.  Father Joseph put on his white soutane as he got ready for his morning meditation.  He spent an hour every morning in silent prayer and meditation before the pa

The tagline of Quickfix adhesive in the 1970s was “Joins everything except broken hearts”.   At about the same time, a therapeutic process known as Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) was gaining ground in psychology. It sought to help people arrive at quick solutions to psychological problems since everyone was too busy to go digging into the past and thus arrive at radical solutions.   The advocates of SFBT argue that it is not necessary to know the cause of a problem to solve it and that there is no necessary relationship between the causes of problems and their solutions.   The problem is not what matters, but the solution.   Searching for the “right” solution is as futile as seeking to know and understand the problem.   What is important is to know your goals, what you want to accomplish, rather than diagnosis of the problem and its history. The fundamental assumption of SFBT is that people are healthy and competent and have the ability to construct solutions

Fiction Kundan was returning home after his monthly entertainment of a night show in the city.  It was past midnight and the heavy downpour had put out the street lamps on the village road.  But Kundan knew the road like the back of his palm and so neither the pitch darkness nor the battering rain slowed him down.  He was about to leave the road and enter the mud path through his farm when he felt the touch of cold steel on his temple.  “Keep your trap shut, else you won’t open it ever again,” said a voice which was horribly rough but perfect in pronunciation.  In the flash of a lightening Kundan saw that the burly figure that was holding a pistol against his temple.  The figure was wearing a western suit, complete with the blazer and a tie.  His suit was drenched in the rain in spite of the enormous parasol he was holding with one hand.  “I’m your boss from now on,” Kundan heard the steely voice.  “You’ll obey my orders and be at my beck and call.” Kundan, not knowin