Tomichan Matheikal's blog

When a society changes in any important respect, dislocation of character takes place, said psychologist Eric Fromm.  For example, when the feudalist system was replaced with the capitalist system many people found themselves like fish out of water until they adapted themselves to the new system.  We live in a time of rapid changes.  Each day comes with a new technology, a new software for the laptop, or a new app to be added to the smart phone.  Our world is not what it was twenty years ago.  Post offices have become redundant.  The video player metamorphosed into CD player which soon became defunct.  The CD/DVD drive replaced the floppy drive, only to be overtaken by the pen drive even before we could absorb all these changes.  Door Darshan became a romantic nostalgia struggling to breathe amid a plethora of channels of all types.  Banks went to ATMs before coming home on our laptop screens.  Queues for paying all kinds of bills vanished when online payment gateways opened

Caliban and Prospero “You taught me language; and my profit on't / Is, I know how to curse,” says Shakespeare’s Caliban to Prospero, the man who taught him the gentleman’s language.   Caliban was no gentleman, however.  He was an evil spirit whom Prospero tried to civilise.  After all, civilising the savage is the white man’s god-given burden. Caliban cursed Prospero because that was his way of asserting his power.  He had been enslaved by Prospero, and words are the only source of power left when one is enslaved.  Words are powerful.  They can make or break people.    A recent study by psychologist Timothy Jay shows that children learn a lot of “bad” words even before they begin schooling.  They pick it up from their parents and other adults at home or around.  As a teacher in a residential school, I have observed how children pick up foul language much more quickly than the more desirable alternative.  The “bad” words carry a certain power, as far as childr

Gestalt therapy is one of the many forms of psychological therapies.  One of its founders, Dr Fritz Perls [1893-1970] made the following lines a kind of prayer: I do my thing and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, And you are not in this world to live up to mine. You are you, and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, it's beautiful. If not, it can't be helped. In my youth, I had typed this and pasted it in a place I could see often.  For years, it remained there.  Finally it was worn out.  By that time, however, it had become part of my memory, my consciousness.  The fact is that I never mastered the art of relating to others.  Maybe, too much ego.  More probably, sheer inability.  Most probably, lack of inclination.  Today, moving towards the autumn of life, I’m still convinced that Perls is right.  Each one of us has to grow in our own way.  There is much that others can contribute, but whether people c

Easter brings to mind the resurrection of Jesus.  But Easter was celebrated even before Jesus.  It was a spring festival.  Many states in India have similar festivals.  Vishu in Kerala and Bihu in Assam are examples.  In Western literary traditions, winter symbolises death and spring is the harbinger of new life.  “April is the cruellest month,” begins T S Eliot’s classical poem, The Waste Land . The Eliotean waste land is a metaphor for the aridity of modern life.  In such a world there is only perpetual winter, winter that keeps us warm.  Our life is no better than death, implies Eliot.  We live death-in-life existence clutching lifeless roots in “this stony rubbish”.  Easter, or resurrection as it has come to mean today, is a celebration of new life.  Spring comes with a new life that stirs up the dull roots that lay beneath the snow in winter, to use the Eliotean metaphor.   The whole Christian concept of the Holy Week which starts a week before Easter Sunday is

Along with other teachers, I took some students on an outing. Some pictures I found interesting.

Christians all over the world commemorate the crucifixion of Jesus today, Good Friday.  Jesus, in all probability, did not intend to found a new religion; he wished to reform his own religion, Judaism.  This is the opinion of many well known theologians like Hans Kung.  In his brief history, The Catholic Church [Phoenix Press, 2002], Kung says, “... he (Jesus) did not seek to found a separate community distinct from Israel with its own creed and cult, or to call to life an organization with its own constitution and offices, let alone a great religious edifice.  No, according to all the evidences, Jesus did not found a church in his lifetime.” (page 12) In Dostoevsky’s novel The Karamazov Brothers , there is a Grand Inquisitor who asks Jesus who appeared in Russia teaching people freedom and love, “Why do you come to disturb us?”  Will Jesus be a nuisance to the Church and its leaders if he comes again today?  Will the priests seek a way to eliminate him?  After all, wasn

Fiction My husband was arrested tonight.  What was his crime?  He used a bicycle to travel from home to his office and back.  We live in Bhatti Mines, a wild side of Delhi where the jungle mingles with the spiritual.  Bhatti Mines is a reserved forest, strictly speaking.  But the forest has been encroached upon by people of all sorts.  They say that we are encroachers too though we lived here long before the land was declared reserved forest.  They tried to throw us out of here many, many years ago.  We refused to go.  So Sanjay Gandhi, Indira Gandhi’s infamous son, decided to leave this land to us.  Our ancestors called it Sanjay Colony in his honour.  Our ancestors were too illiterate to know what Sanjay Gandhi meant, let alone what his politics meant.  Today, long after Sanjay Gandhi and his sterilisations are dead, when the land has been declared reserved forest, there are all kinds of religious people who call themselves swamis and babas and gurus that build fences r