Tomichan Matheikal's blog

The Beas sparkled like molten silver with the gentle touch of the morning sun.  It could not assuage the mutiny that was mounting among Alexander’s soldiers, however. How long and how far?  Coenus, the general of Alexander’s army, raised the question.  We have come a long way in search of some mirage.  We have bathed in the Tigris and the Indus, played in the Nile and the Euphrates, sailed across the Oxus and the Jaxartes.  We breathed the air of deserts, mountains, steppes and fields.  We trudged miles and miles, thousands of miles.  Of victory, booty, glory and novelty, we’ve had our fill. Alexander looked into Coenus’s eyes. He saw longing in them.  Longing for wife.  For children.  Father and mother.  No harlot can ever replace the touch of the wife.  No victory can match the smiles of your children.  Eight years.  They’ve been away from their homeland for eight years. But we are conquerors, said Alexander.  Conquest is our way, our life, and our truth.  There is no

Selknam people who became extinct in 1974 because of Us-Them division made by ? When Angela Loij died in 1974, a tribe became extinct.  Angela was the last surviving woman of the Selknam tribe in Chile, South America.  Communism still survives in Latin America. Prakash Karat, one of the surviving Communists in India wants to join the AAP. Karat and his wife Brinda are supposed to be intellectuals. AAP belongs to ... Whom? The Anarchist Who should be relegated to the forest, as suggested by the Prime Minister of the country who claimed to belong to the working class but behaves more like a King of some buried era? Angela, the  Romantic fools still allowed to survive in India mourn the extinction of your race. Not for your sake.  Not at all for the sake of the colonists who killed your people. For the sake of the future generations. Not for the sake of “unity in uniformity” For which Our leaders want to drive the last nail on some coffins.

“Treat me as a king would treat another king.”  Porus is believed to have said that to Alexander the Great when he was defeated in the war and brought as a prisoner to the latter.  Prime Minister Modi, the invincible King of Indian democracy from 2002 (the year from which the BJP won every election whose campaign was led by Mr Modi), displayed similar chivalry when he rang up the victorious Kejriwal to congratulate him and rather condescendingly offered him a cup of tea in the royal durbar of Chai pe Charcha. Mr Kejriwal was too shocked by the election result to understand the Mr Modi’s condescension.  Not even in the remotest apogee of his imagination had Kejriwal expected to win 67 seats.  Yet he won them.  In spite of all the royal glory that Mr Modi generously lent the campaign.  In spite of the crores of rupees spent on full front page ads in national newspapers. In spite of the defections from both the Congress and the AAP.  In spite of all odds and ends. Dean Nelson

The victory of Mr Arvind Kejriwal and his party in Delhi shows that democracy is not only vibrant in India but also is politically aware and socially responsible.  The people of Delhi rejected Mr Narendra Modi and his kind of politics which benefit only the rich and the powerful or a particular religious community.  A peon in my school told me on the day of the election, “Don’t vote for Modi’s party.”  I asked why.  “It’s the party of people like the Ambanis and the Tatas,” he said.  “Mukesh Ambani bought 4 TV channels after NaMo became the PM.”  He named the channels to me.  He knew that Mr Mukesh Ambani virtually owned 27 TV channels in India.  The Delhi Assembly election shows that Indians are able to see through the colourful masks worn by their leaders.    Mr Modi’s personalised Republic Day suit which reportedly cost Rs10 lakh and other similarly blatant displays of puerile narcissism must have grated on the nerves of a nation which has thousands of people who die of cold