Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Courtesy The Hindu I happened to stop by a wayside dhaba in the fringes of Delhi this evening.  While waiting for someone there, I watched the cooks prepare tandoori rotis and other tandoori items including chicken tikka and paneer puran.  If you actually watch how these dishes are prepared, especially in the summer heat of Delhi, you won’t ever eat it.  Human sweat mingles with the dusty dough and sliced paneer liberally.  One of the tandoor operators approached the cashier and asked for drinking water.  “Order a bottle of mineral water,” he demanded.  Obviously there was no good drinking water in the restaurant – at least not good enough for the insider!  The cashier fumed, “How can I buy water?”  He was not the proprietor, after all.  He was just another employee earning a pittance from the boss who would be riding the bullet train promised by the Prime Minister’s new rail budget. The tandoor operator went back to work mumbling something like a child chided by

The Supreme Court's ruling on Islamic (sharia) courts is a move in the right direction.  Religious courts have no legal binding in India though a lot of such courts became very active recently, of particular concern being the khap panchayats that sealed the fate of many people in some of the North Indian states.  Among the many bizarre judgements delivered by the kangaroo courts is one in which a young woman was 'legally' raped by almost a whole village in West Bengal merely because the man she chose to marry belonged to a different religion.    When the Constitution of India allowed every citizen to follow his/her religion and its practices, it was not handing over the law on a platter to the priests.  Religions cannot be parallel judiciaries. They can guide and help believers to lead good lives.  In that process of guidance and counselling, if both the aggrieved parties arrive at a consensus the judiciary of the country won't generally interfere unless there are cr

Europe was labouring under the weight of a socio-political system when Enlightenment dawned on it in the 17 th and 18 th centuries.  Most European countries had a hierarchical system with the King or the Queen occupying the top position claiming to have derived his/her power directly from none other than God.  Then there were the priests of the Church who not only brought God’s power to the King or the Queen but also enjoyed a lot of benefits of that power in their own royal ways.  Below the clergy reclined the aristocrats.  All these three together sucked the blood of the common people who did all the work and paid all the taxes. The philosophers who questioned this system usually belonged to the aristocratic classes.  But they possessed the sensitivity to feel the inhumanity of the system.  Thus Rousseau (1712-1778) lamented the chains that shackled man everywhere.  The encyclopaedists redefined ‘political authority’ and ‘natural liberty’.  The coeditor of the Encyclopaedia