Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Fiction A few years ago, I was holidaying in Kerala.  One of the many journeys found me reaching the sleepy little town nearest to my home late in the night.  The last bus to the village had left three hours ago.  A couple of auto-rickshaws waited languidly for weary passengers.  I was not weary and I decided to walk.  The few drinks I had just had along with a light dinner roused up the romantic spirit in me.  I thought of the winding village road lined with a variety of trees on both the sides.  The sound of cicadas kept me company as soon as I left behind the lights of the town.  There were very few street lights.  Fireflies danced mirthfully teasing me.  The moon shone brightly in the sky and the beams filtered through the leaves of the trees casting weird patterns on the road.  Occasionally a dog barked from some veranda and then went to sleep again.  The village cemetery lay a few hundred metres from my home.  As I passed by the cemetery I saw a figure standing in t

Sunday Musings If I do not want to go to heaven, whose business is it to decide otherwise for me?  I have come across scores of people who insist on deciding what I should or should not do so that my soul is saved from perdition. They have taken much pain to attach too many strings all along my way and pull them in certain directions applying the torque of their calculation so that my soul is not lost for eternity.  It always baffled me why my soul was so important to them when there were/are millions of other people who stand in genuine need of benevolence. When I stumbled on Emile Durkheim recently I got some kind of an answer.  God is a lever with which people are elevated to heaven using the fulcrum of religion.  No, Durkheim didn’t say it in those words.  I’m paraphrasing him.  But why does anyone take the trouble to do all that leveraging?  Because every society seeks order, a social system.  And God is the most effective tool for forging that system.  All those p

The violinist played the last note with a solemn sway of the bow and then bowed to the audience with a proud panache.  His heart longed for an applause.  Then came one clap from somewhere.  Two.  A few more.  And it spread across the auditorium.  The ego of the violinist was pleased. It’s only much later he learnt that most people in the auditorium were deaf.  Still later he learnt that the two or three people who initiated the applause were bribed to do so. Apparently the above is a moral science story meant to teach humility.  The sheer truth is that the writer of the story was flexing his ego by writing it.  I have adapted the story from Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), great philosopher.  He told the story with the intention of accusing his audience (readers) of metaphorical deafness.  He wanted to prove that his readers lacked the brains to understand him. Schopenhauer Schopenhauer had published his masterpiece, The World as Will and Idea .  In his letter t