Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Is Modi really BJP? This is a question that Prof Shiv Vishvanathan raises in today’s Hindu .  Vajpayee could come to power in India and hold it with respectability because he was a genuine Hindu, a genuine human being.  Any genuine religious person is necessarily a genuine human being.  Vajpayee could not have killed human beings for the sake of votes.  Vajpayee was a poet, you see.  And Modi is a chaiwala. The difference matters.  What kind of a nation are we building up?  Is it the nation of the mafia or is it a nation of a people who can think freely?  For the third time in two days I received phone calls from Tata Life Insurance Co.  I am one of the unfortunate clients who deposited a fairly large sum of money in their insurance business (Business, yes) a few years ago in my wife’s name.  When I deposited the amount my wife didn’t have a private phone number.  So I had given my own mobile phone number.  Now they call me up asking if I am Margaret and why I am

Dear Mr Narendra Modi, At the outset I ask your pardon for addressing you as Mister rather that something like “Worshipful” because in case you become the Prime Minister of India that’s what you would demand from the citizens.  You like to be worshipped.  You’ve already got (or bought) many of your chelas to sing hymns and display posters projecting you as a god.  However, even if you become the PM I won’t address you as “Worshipful”, let alone imagine you as a god.  I’d rather die. That’s not the issue which prompted me write this letter, however.  It is the report in the front page of today’s Hindu titled Modi fears a ‘pink revolution’ . You fear for the lives of cows in the country.  I have no problem about anyone choosing to worship anything.  Once I attended a meditation course in which the participants were told that we could meditate even on a potato.  Keep a potato in front of you and concentrate on it.  Focus.  Slowly the potato will assume larger-than-pota

“Stoicism is the wisdom of madness and cynicism is the madness of wisdom,” said Bergen Evans.  Both stoicism and cynicism are stances that spill over the borders of the normal; hence the nuances of madness.  Can’t one be normal and yet be wise? Psychologist Erik Erikson described wisdom as “detached concern with life.”  Detachment implies a transcendence of emotions while concern involves a certain degree of emotions.  If the stoic and cynic in ourselves can come together in a rational understanding, we will be sanely wise. Life inevitably takes us through a multitude of experiences.  Some are good experiences while the others may be bad.  Joys and sorrows are intermingled in life.  There are both successes and failures.  A time may come in our life when we learn to rise above the urge to celebrate joys and successes and lament sorrows and failures.  That’s when we have become wise. As we grow older we should acquire greater integrity of being.  Integrity is a psychol