Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Painting by  Jean-Léon  Gérôme Yet another Good Friday is here and Jesus will be crucified yet again.  “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  Jesus will lament yet again writhing on the crosses erected in churches whose architectural splendour will proudly proclaim the imperial glory of the religion founded in his name. The heroes of the Beatitudes will metamorphose into caricatures in the sermons delivered by impassioned priests from the fourteen stations of the Way of the Cross.  The Good Samaritan will withdraw to his hermitage and scribble in his diary, “History is not only the lies of the victors but also the self-delusions of the vanquished.” The seeds of the Kingdom of Heaven have been genetically modified in the capitalist laboratories.  They sprout truths for the new gospels.   And the truths metamorphose into crosses.  The crosses will mark Good Fridays. I salute you, Jesus.  Your destiny is to be crucified again and again.  Or else, be locked up in t

Book Review Only extraordinary writers can write a gripping novel without a neat plot.  Akhil Sharma’s slim novel (228 pages in the hardbound edition that I got – it would be just half of that if formatted a la the old Penguin pocket edition) tells the story of the Mishra family in America.  Everything is going fine for this newly migrated family when tragedy strikes in the form of an accident that the elder son, Birju, meets with.  The accident renders Birju practically lifeless: severely brain-damaged.  The novel shows how this tragedy affects the other three family members.  The story is told by the younger son, Ajay, who is eight years old at the beginning of the novel.  Ajay grows up seeing his father becoming an alcoholic and mother struggling to cope with the hardships.  Ajay has a grudge somewhere within him about mother’s fondness for the comatose Birju.  What makes the novel marvellous is the way the novelist expresses the feelings, emotions and attitudes of his

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