Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Almost twenty years ago I attended a week-long retreat at a religious centre in Kerala.  A few circumstances in my life had conspired together to throw my inner life into absolute chaos.  When you are going through a protracted ordeal, you are quite sure to attract a lot of well-wishers.  Though many of these well-wishers are actually people who derive a secret delight by peeping into your agony, a few of them are genuinely interested in putting into practise all their pastoral skills.  A universal verdict was passed by all those who claimed to have diagnosed the condition of my soul: that I should attend a retreat. A Catholic retreat usually consists of a series of sermons or religious lectures interspersed with prayer services culminating in the purgation of one’s sins through the confession.  Like the drowning man clutching at the floating straw, I embraced the retreat as fanatically as I could. The preacher, the retreat guru, was informed by some of my well-wishers much

Michael’s nights were haunted by the woods.  The woods were vanishing from real lands.  They were encroached upon by people who knew how to bribe elected leaders.  Thus residential apartments and health resorts replaced the woods.  Godmen and Ammas replaced the tree nymphs and the elves.  The woods were lovely, dark and deep.  Michael had no promises to keep or miles to go before he could sleep.  In fact, sleep had deserted him.  Nymphs and elves haunted his nocturnal wakefulness.  The woods beckoned him. Not all the forests were swallowed by human greed.  Michael lived at the edge of the greed.  His village was yet to be sold to builders and developers.  It would be sold soon, however.  An Adventure Park would replace the village.  Michael drank the last bit of the distilled brew left in the bottle, mounted his cycle and went off whistling all the way to where the builders and bulldozers had not reached yet.  The moon was shining brightly in the midnight sky boosting t

If there were an undo button in life, what would I undo?  This is the question raised by Anjana at Indiblogger this week. Wishing to undo something is a sign of regret.  There are many things in my life that I have reasons to regret. But I choose not to regret.  I go with Don Juan, the “Man of Knowledge” in Carlos Castaneda’s many inspiring books, who advised us not to regret but make decisions.  Regrets don’t achieve anything.  To err is human.  To forgive or not to forgive is also human.  Forgetting certain errors makes life easier.  Learning from certain errors makes us wiser.  Undoing errors is only wishful thinking.  There is no undo button in life. Could I undo my birth?  The ultimate absurdity of human endeavours would have made me wish that.  But I don’t want to be a Hamlet oscillating between a harsh reality and an undesirable alternative.  Nor am I pining for the Buddhist nirvana since nirvana is the inevitable end of every human being as far as I understand hum

The Hammer of God is a short story by G. K. Chesterton about two brothers, Wilfred and Norman.  While Wilfred is an exceptionally devout priest, Norman is a retired colonel who finds his delight in wine and women.  Wilfred’s attempts to inject some fear of God or the divine morality into his brother’s soul are only met with ridicule from the latter.  Finally the priest kills his brother.  Worse, he tries to put the guilt on Joe, the village idiot. The theme of Chesterton’s story is the potential devilishness of self-righteous morality.   The self-righteously religious people see themselves as superior to the normal people who have certain weaknesses like lust and gluttony.  The self-righteous people prefer to pray alone in some corner or niche of the church or the Satsang, away from the sinners.  They may even ascend some mountain in search of their superior aloofness.  Standing at a height, actual or metaphorical, they begin to see the normal people as too small.  One can onl

Today’s Hindu newspaper carries a number of articles on the one year of Mr Modi as Prime Minister. Except the one BJP supporter, none of the other writers has anything good to say about the year that India passed through.  I found it an interesting exercise to take the major arguments of the BJP spokesman, Ravi Shankar Prasad, and rebut them with the arguments given by the other writers.  Here’s a discussion I fabricated out of the views expressed by the four writers.   Ravi Shankar Prasad R S Prasad : In just a span of 12 months, the NDA government has succeeded in restoring India’s image as a fast-growing economy . Sitaram Yechuri: The statistical base year for national income accounts has been changed in order to project the GDP growth rate in better light.  Despite this, it is clear that the manufacturing and industrial growth are just not taking off. Prasad: The government’s priority is the poor and the marginalised . Sitaram Yechuri Yechuri : The sha

Lesson No. 1 Firoze Mohomed Shakir (left) Firoze Mohomed Shakir lives in Mumbai.  I have been haunting him like a ghost in some vague quest for quite a time in the virtual places I was permitted access.  His photographs , for example.  What drew me to him initially was his poetry which I used to read via indiblogger.in .  The poems were entirely different from the ones I had ever come across.  They looked initially like prose broken into arbitrary lines.  As I focused more I realized that secularism has as much hope in India as Sufism. Below is his latest poem that I have copy-pasted from his status update in Facebook.  The postscript also belongs to him. [Dear Firoze, I hope you don’t mind my using you as a lesson. Personally, I’d rather be a Hindu (to use your words) than be religious!] I Would Rather Be a Hindu Than Be a Wahhabi yes   i would rather be called a kafir   than be a wahabbi   i would rather be a hindu   than be a wahhabi   both options   clos

Historically the Enlightenment refers to a paradigm shift that took place in the 17 th and 18 th centuries.  It was also called the Age of Reason because it emphasised the power of the human mind to liberate the individual and improve society.  It argued that knowledge can be derived only from experience, experiment and observation.  It encouraged people to use their own critical reasoning to free their minds from prejudice, unexamined authority, and oppression by their religion or the state. The world made tremendous progress in science and technology because of the Enlightenment ideas.  Consequently human life was revolutionised.  Religion and the superstitions it generated took a backseat.  Priests lost most of their political clout.  Secular values spread considerably across the globe.  Science and technology gave us more leisure and luxury than we deserved.  More gadgets than we could handle with responsibility.  More individual liberty.  More selfishness too. Th