Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Fiction “Which topi did you buy?”  She asked while her fingers flew with supersonic speed on the virtual keypad of the smartphone commenting on the selfies posted by her countless friends on Facebook. “Your favourite brand,” he said indifferently.  He was busy with the selfie videos posted by his other girlfriends on Whatsapp.  He couldn’t remember which her favourite brand was.  It doesn’t matter, he knew.  She was not likely to notice it.  What does the brand name of an artificial skin matter when the bliss experienced by real skins explodes like a neural bomb in the brain making it oblivious to everything else?  He knew girls well enough to understand that their brand choices were only ways of inflating their already overblown egos.  “Hey, look here,” she said.  “Our PM has sent a selfie after casting his vote.” “He is our leader,” he said without looking at what she was playing with.  He was busy with his own selfie messages on Whatsapp.  But he added, “The leade

The burnt-out parts of crackers and fireworks Lay scattered in the yard and road and wherever the eye could reach. The festival is over. The intoxication lingered a while. And that died out too. Naturally. Leaving an aftertaste somewhere in the hollows within, Sweet and bitter, bitterness competing with sweetness. The sound and fury of the fireworks on the ground and in the heaven Repeated the same old tales, wise or idiotic – who knows?  Who cares? Dazzling lights strutted and fretted Their hour upon the stage Leaving distorted and gaping fragments behind. The fragments will be swept into the dustbins of Swachh Bharat Maybe the next time the Great Actor drives us to the broom store Or maybe they will be carried away by the winds of time That blow relentlessly And mercilessly Erasing the markings we make on dust.

When the voice of truth rises from the minarets, The Buddha smiles, And the broken chain of history reconnects. The lines are from the poem, The Relics of Butkara , written by Malala’s father and quoted by her in her autobiography, I am Malala .  I’m still reading the book and found this passage about Butkara, her birthplace, interesting. “Our Butkara ruins were a magical place to play hide and seek,” she writes.  They were relics from the days when Buddhism was practised by the people of the place.  In other words, Malala’s forefathers must have been Buddhists.  The people who are now Muslims have a Buddhist ancestry.  It is that reconnection that Malala’s father speaks about in his poem.  “Islam came to our valley (Swat) in the eleventh century when Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni invaded from Afghanistan and became our ruler, but in ancient times Swat was a Buddhist kingdom,” writes Malala.  “The Buddhists had arrived here in the second century and their kings ruled th