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

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