Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Fiction Nebamun was determined and nothing could deter him now.  Now was his opportunity.  Antony had gone back to Rome being summoned by Caesar.  Cleopatra would be alone.  Nebamun could offer her his heart.  Offer his heart to the goddess of love whom age cannot wither or custom cannot stale – that was how one of Antony’s commanders described her the other day.  Let her trample upon his heart if she so chooses.  Nebamun was the devotee and Cleopatra was the goddess.  The goddess can choose what to do with the devotee and it is the bounden duty of the devotee to obey, to make whatever sacrifice the goddess demands. He stood outside Cleopatra’s royal chamber waiting until she came out. “Your Majesty,” Nebamun drew Cleopatra’s attention when she was about to pass him by as if he never existed.  Queens don’t pay attention to ordinary soldiers even if they stand in places where they are not expected. “Yes,” said Cleopatra staring at him.  “What do you want?  Why ar

In one of his Odes, the Roman poet Horace portrays Maecenas, Roman statesman, as wondering what the Chinese were up to.  Horace lived in the first century BCE.  He was exaggerating when he wrote that; he was trying to please his patron by depicting him as someone whose concerns extended far and wide.  But, with hindsight today, we can say that Horace’s line was not sheer hollow flattery. Some 200 years before Horace, Shih Huang-ti, who was called – or called himself –  ‘the First Emperor of China,’ employed 700,000 labourers to build the humungous Great Wall of China by linking the many existing fortifications.  He also constructed a huge network of roads and canals paving the material foundations of a great civilisation. Shih Huang-ti was a barbarian conqueror, however.  He was illiterate and was despised by his literate subjects.  His dynasty failed eventually.  His renown became equivocal.  But the Great Wall caused him to be revered as the founder of China. Many dyn

Historical Fiction His smile could quell a mob or raise an army.  The charismatic Usman dan Fodio was a holy man whom the Sultan of Gobir (today’s Nigeria) brought into his kingdom in order to make the people more religious.  Bringing a religious person too close to your life can be like taking the snake lying on the fence and putting it in your pocket.  At least that’s how it turned out to be in the case of Yunfa, the Sultan of Gobir. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge had just brought out their Romantic Manifesto, The Lyrical Ballads , ushering a poetic revolution in England.  The bloodcurdling violence of the French Revolution had given birth to a whole series of reforms implemented by Napoleon.  In Africa, Allah was beginning to bring light in quite another way. “There is no God but Allah,” Usman’s voice reverberated in the streets and highways.  “All ways are impure except those shown by Allah.”  Usman denounced the ways of the ordinary people as evil. 

My blindness will cost you more than the sight of the other guides, said the eyeless man to Ibn Battuta, me. I started this journey as a pilgrimage, the Hajj that ensures the soul the bliss of Paradise. But Paradise is here, on the earth, I learnt as I travelled through Dar al-Islam. Mountains and valleys, rivers and deserts, The birds that fly and the snakes that crawl, The infinite variety of hypnotic women Whose men are grappling with fate In the torrid ruggedness of their life. Sight is a curse, said my blind guide, in the desert where a wind can shift a mountain. The sand dune you see now is a valley after a storm. Trust not your eyes in the land of illusions. Trust not your ears in the land whose air echoes the songs of spirits and calls of phantoms. Trust not your senses in the land of Ostriches that bury their sight in sand. Trust me, I’m the blind man of the desert whose heart beats with insights; I’m the blind man who sees

“I knew you would come to deliver me from my stony existence,” Ahalya said touching Rama’s feet. “I’m just a means,” Rama said with an understanding smile.  “Deliverance is one’s own choice, not given by somebody else.” “But your touch sent grace flowing through my being.  I could feel it.  I felt the stone within me melting away.  The lightness of my being now brings me bliss untold.” Ahalya - a Ravi Varma painting Ahalya was living in a granite cave ever since the intercourse she had had with Indra, the lord of svargaloka.  Gods can transform your life in either way, she realised.  Here is a god who liberated her from the monolith that weighed down her consciousness, a monolith that was put there in her consciousness by another god. She had become a monolith after Indra visited her that day when her husband, Sage Gautama, old man with wrinkled skin and matted hair, had gone to fetch the materials required for his religious oblations.  Indra looked like Gautama

India is governed by a political party which draws its sustenance from the Us-Them divisiveness.  From the infamous Gujarat riots onwards, India witnessed about 7000 incidents of communal violence engendered by the Us-Them thinking. The Us-Them thinking is as old as known human history.  Every people always loved to make some distinctions between themselves and the perceived others .  Look at our movies and you will see how people belonging to other cultures or speaking other languages are made to look like either fools or villains.  Such division achieves many purposes at the same time.  One, it enhances our own sense of identity.  Our group identity becomes stronger when the rival group is portrayed as weak, illiterate, villainous, etc.  Two, it tilts the struggle for the limited resources in our favour.  We turn the tables so that the resources will fall to our side.  Three, it prepares the members of the community to fight against perceived threats from the others. 

Some three or four years ago, a former student of mine who was then a budding leader of a national political party, told me that he could “sell” me a party ticket for Rs 5 crore.  The sum astounded me.  “It’s nothing, sir,” he reassured me, “I’ll teach you how to get that amount back in a month’s time once you win the election.” When I heard Aam Aadmi Party’s lament that the BJP was trying to buy its MLA for Rs 4 crore, it didn’t surprise me.  If people are ready to buy party tickets before the election for crores of rupees, the neta’s price after winning the election should be a double digit crore.  Four crore is rather cheap, I think, for a sitting MLA.  Is that why AAP decided to cry foul? Delhi BJP vice president, Sher Singh Dagar, reacted very formulaically.  “If it is proved I’ll not only resign from the party, but from politics itself,” he said.  Every neta worth his sodium chloride knows how to plug any hole with darkness.  If you are not a master of darkness, you c