Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Fiction Mayank had been through countless admission tests.  The worried look on his mother’s face had become a source of guilt for the little boy.  “I’m sorry, mom,” he consoled his mother.  He didn’t know what else to say.  The way she looked at him with so much pity in her eyes made him feel guilty, guilty of being alive, guilty of having been born. Mayank was lucky that his father was so busy with his job in the city that he lacked the luxury of the time for worrying about his son.  Otherwise how would he bear to see two dear faces carrying an endless worry named Mayank?  Mother was a teacher in Ananda Vidyashram which belonged to Phenomenananda Baba and faced the threat of extinction. Mayank was a class 3 student of Ananda Vidyashram.  But when the new session started there were only a handful of students all together in the school.  Phenomenananda Baba was not interested in running the school.  The school was started by his great, great grandfather, Anantananda B

Book Review Perumal Murugan’s novel, One Part Woman , which attracted unnecessary controversy in Tamil Nadu recently, is essentially about the fundamental complementarity of the male and the female components of humanity.  “The male and the female together make the world,” as the priest in the Ardhanareeswara temple tells Kali, the protagonist.  Within each individual too there exists both the male and the female components.  Who destroyed that harmonious balance between the male and the female? Is it the Brahmin who expediently creates and imposes certain rules and regulations on the people?  The novel raises this question when a Brahmin lawyer gets toddy and arrack banned in the Salem district and thus throws the whole Sanar community out of “their traditional livelihood.”  But the novel never suggests that the Brahmins have been responsible for the loss of certain traditions.  It does not even suggest that the traditions are sacred or useful in any significant way

I happened to come across this video by chance.  Loved it for its message, conveyed clearly and powerfully.  Though Ms Padukone is endorsing women empowerment, the message is applicable to all human beings and not just women alone. Many years ago, another woman, Ayn Rand, made one of her characters say that the savages said, "Hands Up!" while the policy for the civilised world should be "Hands Off!" "My body, my mind, my choice," says Deepika.  It should be so for everyone. Why should anyone's mind or body be meddled with by anyone else? Why should a priest or a fanatic assume that he has the right to impose his truth(s) on others? Why should a political party decide the course that history should take, let alone the course it already took? Why should anyone become the guardian of others' morality? The most courageous act is thinking for yourself.  Aloud. Do it. PS. My last short story, The Devil has a Religion ,  is about h

Fiction It’s not only the gods but the devils too have specific religions, Maria realised when she saw the devil appearing on her husband’s face fifteen years after she had seen it the last time. Fifteen years ago, one nondescript autumn afternoon in Shillong, Philip came back from the school where he worked as a mathematics teacher and declared that he had resigned from his job.  Maria was stunned though she had known deep within her all the time that this was coming.  Reverend Father Joseph Potthukandathil, the Headmaster of Saint Joseph’s School where Philip taught, had been rubbing up Philip in the wrong way for a long time, years in fact, assuming that it was every Catholic priest’s canonical burden to bring the lost sheep back to the fold.  Philip not only refused to accept the priest’s gospel but also cocked a snook at it by guzzling peg after peg of brandy sitting in the Marbaniang Bar that stood just a hundred metres away from the church where the priest who dreamt o

Book Review Ramayana: the Game of Life Book 2: Shattered Dreams Author:  Shubha Vilas Publisher: Jaico, 2015 Pages: 387       Price: Rs350 Both the Indian epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, are brilliant tales about the complex game called life.  The good and the evil, the benevolent and malevolent, the divine and the demoniac, all appear in their due proportions at the appropriate times.  Though many thousand years have passed since their composition, the stories continue to fascinate readers all over the world because they are still relevant.  The virtues and vices portrayed in them belong to mankind irrespective of time. However, any reader should learn to interpret them according to his/her given time.  This is precisely what Shubha Vilas has done with his series of books titled, Ramayana: the Game of Life .  While the first book, Rise of the Sun Prince , dwelt upon the life of Rama until his marriage, the present volume takes us through arguably the m

Killing has always been the job of the religious.  They kill for their gods and the gods are always happy.  Death is the pastime of the gods.  And of those who are close to the gods.  Remember the sacrifices stipulated by the Vedas? Remember the crusades made by the Christian missionaries in the medieval period? At least, remember the terrorist attacks of our own days? The politics of the gods.  If you're not sick of them, you have mastered the art of killing. 

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the British ever set foot on the count