Tomichan Matheikal's blog

A scene from Delhi.  Source: The Hindu In his book, The Rebel , Albert Camus speaks about two types of crimes: crimes of passion and crimes of logic.  Heathcliff of the Wuthering Heights will kill anyone who stands between him and his beloved Cathy.  This is a crime of passion.  He is motivated by his passion, and his passion is genuine. Camus calls him a man of character.  As long as you don’t get in the way of his love, he won’t touch you.  He won’t even notice your existence, in fact.  You are nothing to him.  All that matters to him is his love, his Cathy, nothing else. Now, suppose Heathcliff converts his passion into a doctrine.  Suppose he begins to believe that Cathy is worthy of everybody’s admiration.  Suppose he asks all the people around him to venerate Cathy.  He can make a religion or a doctrine out of his love for Cathy.  He can build up a whole theology around his love.  He may get some supporters too.  He can get those supporters to drag out from home anyo

Finally Tony Blair has admitted that the 2003 Iraq war was a mistake. Juan Cole, teacher and writer, compares Blair's apology to that of the little boy who, on being asked to apologise for calling a lady "fat," said, "Lady, I'm sorry you're fat." America, under the leadership of the quixotic Bush Jr, wanted to secure its hegemony in the Middle East particularly for grabbing the petroleum available there.  Even after the United Nations Monitoring Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) reported that it could not discover any weapon of mass destruction in Kuwait, Don Quixote of America led his army against the country with the passionate support of his Sancho Panza, Tony Blair. Thousands of people were killed.  Precious properties were destroyed. Thousands of people were displaced.  Many more thousands were left as survivors suffering from chronic heartaches.  And quite a few thousand terrorists were spawned by the heartaches. India is witn

Suresh was watching Bajrangi Bhaijaan when I dropped in. “It is easy to peddle hatred,” a TV reporter in the movie was saying, “love gets few takers.”  But the movie ended in the victory of love over hatred with the Pakistani Muslims and the Indian Hindus gathering on either side of the international border clamouring for love.  “Why does a meek creature like the cow instigate so much aggression among people?”  I asked when the movie was over.   “Why the cow, even an inanimate thing like a piece of cloth cut in a particular geometrical shape can instigate aggression the moment religion becomes fanaticism,” said Suresh.  “And religion becomes fanaticism only when the character of the person is domineering and aggressive.” Suresh went on to explain that the submissive person who is religious surrenders himself to whatever virtues his religion teaches him such as compassion or selflessness.  The surrender can go to extremes depending on the degree of the believer’s re

I have collected 33 short stories of mine into an ebook which will be published next week.  Most of these stories were written in the last two years and published in my blog .  Just to give a taste of what the stories are like, let me give the links to three stories selected at random: Ahalya – the first story in the volume And quiet flowed the Beas – the tenth story The Nomad Learns Morality – the title story The volume is dedicated to “Radha Soami Satsang Beas especially Dr Pranita Gopal.”  RSSB is a religious organisation which took over a school in Delhi where I was teaching for quite a while.  In about two years the organisation bulldozed the school to smithereens.  The bulldozer became my guru and muse.  However, the stories are in no way related to the school or RSSB.  Not at all to the bulldozer.  Not even to Dr Pranita Gopal.  All these happened to be my best inspirers.  I’m obliged to them eternally.  Were it not for them, the potential for fiction writin

Marilyn Monroe loved dogs because they never bit her unlike the human beings.  Mark Twain was of a similar opinion.  “If you pick up a starving dog,” declared the witty writer, “and make him prosperous he will not bite you.  This is the principal difference between a dog and man.”  Milan Kundera found his Eden by sitting “with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon.” Our leaders of the most powerful political party today seem to hold dogs in a slightly different regard.  A few months back our Prime Minister declared his love for puppies when he made a subtle equation between them and the victims of communal riots belonging to a particular community.  Now General V K Singh, union minister and former army chief, thinks that the Dalits share some genes with the canines.    The dogs are very friendly creatures which are unpolitically selfless.  They earned a bad name in India, however, because their general (not to be confused with the General) lot in this country was no bet

Real togetherness is the relationship between the tree and the earth.  One draws its sustenance from the other.  Both draw life from each other.  Necessarily.  Ineluctably.  That ineluctability is the real togetherness.  But the extraction is based on a deep understanding.  The tree needs the earth for driving its hungry roots down as much as the earth needs the tree for materialising its fecundity.  When the infant draws life from its mother’s breasts, the mother is enriched too.  That mutual enrichment is real togetherness. Real togetherness is when man and woman probe into the eyes of each other and see oneself reflected in the eyes of the other.  The other becomes a lake into which one plunges to emerge in a while with enhanced zest for life.  The breeze of the heavens wafts through the necessary interstices of that zest.  Real togetherness is the essence of the apple that Eve and Adam bit into before being ejected summarily from God’s patronisation.  It is grap

"The devil called god must indeed be marvellous," exclaims a character in Subhash Chandran's Malayalam novel,  'Manushyanu Oru Amukham,' (A Preface to Man).  The novel has already won many eminent and well-deserved awards. The protagonist argues that the dog which accompanied Yudhishtira to heaven must be a stray creature and the moral is that a man who ignores his fellow creatures in his single-minded pursuit of heaven is no better than a stray dog. Yudhishtira had not cared to throw as much as a loving gaze at his people who were falling dead on the way. Contemporary Yudhishtiras are beseiging the gates of heaven accompanied by holy cows.