Tomichan Matheikal's blog

John Keats admired beauty.  Otherwise he could not have written the poem ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’.  The poem narrates the story of a knight in the middle ages who met a beautiful woman in some wilderness.  She, the beauty, allowed him to take her on his horseback to some places as he wished until finally she took him to her cave and lulled him to sleep.  When the knight woke up, the beauty had disappeared.  He went in search of that beauty all over the valley. Keats’ poem ends with the statement that the knight is still searching for the beautiful woman in that valley years and years after she deserted him.  You would think he was a ghost in case you met him there in that valley.  Seekers of beauty became ghosts in Keats’ era (early 19th century) But Keats belonged to an era when people, at least some people, quested after truth which they thought was beauty.  “Beauty is truth and truth beauty.”  Didn’t Keats write that too?  And you don’t need to know anything more than

Proceed at your own risk “I contend that there are no whole truths , there are only pertinent truths – and pertinence, you must agree, is always a matter of perspective .” The quote is from the arduous novel that won the Booker Prize last year, The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton.  The emphases are added by this author who is still plodding through the novel one week after he started reading it. When Mr Narendra Modi, the Emperor of the South Asian Region, invited the whole Luminaries of the (defunct) SAARC continent to his coronation ceremony, truth began to wiggle and wriggle in my solar plexus until it became a paroxysm.   I had decided to ignore politics in my writing.  But my new Prime Minister won’t let me do it, it seems.  He is the actor par excellence.  Nobody in Indian politics will ever outshine him in histrionics, I am quite sure. Robert Graves may be inspired to resurrect himself from his grave to write yet another sequel to his unparalleled novel, I, Cl

In 1928, eminent economist  John Maynard Keynes wrote in an essay that in a century the standard of life in Europe and America would improve so much that people would have a lot of leisure.  By 2028, “our grandchildren,” wrote Keynes, would have to work only about three hours a day. The economist was quite wrong, it seems.  14 years away from his predicted time,  the standard of life improved, no doubt, but work or work-related activity has increased more than ever even in the continents he mentioned.  In our own country too, the standard of life has improved considerably.  But we find that the working hours in offices have increased rather than decreased.  In spite of superior technologies like the computer in place of the typewriter, and rapid communication systems like the email, we find ourselves busier than people of the previous generation.  In fact, people had much more time for relaxation in the olden days.   I remember how people of my parents’ generation used to spend