Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Fiction His life was an incessant motion, upward and downward, without any real destination.  He was a liftman in the forty-five storey Narayana Apartment. “Narayana!”  Each day of his began with an invocation to his God.  “Give me the patience to endure this purposeless motion.” “If I move up to the 43 rd floor by this lift and return to the ground floor from where I started, what is my displacement, assuming that each floor is 4 metres in height?”  The young boy asked the girl the other day.  They were students who lived on the 43 rd floor. It was that day that he learnt the tragic truth about his life.  He lived a life with zero displacement.  In spite of being in motion for over eight hours a day seven days a week, zero displacement!  Motion without displacement, that was his life. “Narayana!”  He invoked his God again.  Habitually. It was a painful realisation.  That he would live an entire life of motion without achieving any displacement.  His pain wa

Bihar let down Mr Modi.  No other Prime Minister of the country had ever committed him-/herself as wholeheartedly to the elections in any state as Mr Modi had in Bihar this time.  BJP’s defeat in Bihar is Mr Modi’s defeat, however much his supporters might argue otherwise.  Source The whole agenda of development that Mr Modi had promised to the nation, the only objective for which the people of India elected him to the most powerful post in the country, was rubbished by Dadri and Bahari and other such affairs which caught the fancy of the entire Sangh Parivar while Mr Modi was making a world tour except when he mouthed some utopian slogans about development once in a while.    The people of India are not concerned about rewriting the country’s history or converting the country into a theocratic nation.  They have understood that the world has moved on well into the 21 st century where real science and technology matter much more than the rocket technology of Ravana or

Diwali is a festival that is sustained by multiple legends.  The people of Ayodhya lined up with lamps in their hands to welcome back Rama and Sita who had destroyed the evil named Ravana.  The return of the Pandavas after their exile used to add sheen to the Diwali diyas.  Krishna’s victory over Narakasura is commemorated in certain parts of India during Diwali.  The emergence of Lakshmi from the cosmic ocean which was churned by both the gods and the demons may shine in some of the Diwali lights.  The bulk of the universe consists of dark matter.  The 100 billion galaxies each of which may have about 100 billion stars have not dispelled much of the darkness.  Is darkness the essence of the universe?  Is light a diversion granted to the cosmos like the fireflies that come and go in the wildernesses?  If light was more abundant than darkness, perhaps Diwali would not have been celebrated.  Diwali is a reminder about the preponderance of darkness.  About the need to light

33 short stories of mine, most of which were written in the last couple of years, have been published in the form of a book, both printed and digital versions. As I wrote earlier , these stories emerged from the dilemmas and conflicts I faced when certain drastic changes took place where I was working until a few months back.  The changes started with sanctimonious pretensions and ended with a whole school being bulldozed into sheer vacuum.  Right in the capital of the world’s largest democracy.  The whole process was a dark drama which had occasional moments of hilarious farce and profound grotesqueness.  It was an ideal place for a writer to be at.  Human nature reveals itself without masks when survival is threatened.  Drama unfolds one after another.  People walk about with heads buckled down under depression.  People rebel and get thrown out.  Criminal charges are fabricated against those whose rebellion is a serious threat to the wielders of real power.  Life becomes a batt

One BJP minister beefs about his chief minister of the same party in Karnataka and goes to the extent of threatening to behead him if he ate beef “and play football with his severed head.”  We have so many beef-heads in the country who have bizarre notions about games and their tribe is increasing especially since the cow migrated from its usual habitats on the city streets to the new lullabies with which our present leaders are trying to put the whole nation to an intoxicated sleep.  The lullabies are, however, beginning to sound like beef-hearts – at least to some of us. The BJP chief minister of Karnataka does not eat beef.  He was merely defending the people’s right to eat whatever they liked.  But the BJP does not believe in such magnanimity.  It is a party beefed up by religious and cultural ideologies.  Religion has its god-given truths which no beef-head can transmute into beef-hearts.  A plain truth is that beef is no delicacy.  It is hard and extremely fibrous. 

According to Chetan Bhagat, a liberal in India today is a person who was born in an upper class family, received English education, absorbed the world culture, carried hotdogs to school in their tiffin box, visited Disneyland, and ridiculed those who spoke English in India with a vernacular accent.  The popular writer said this and much more in his Times of India article yesterday.  He goes on to reduce the current communal disturbances and acts of intolerance to a mere class struggle between the privileged and the underprivileged, the latter being the present-day nationalists whom the former refer to derogatorily as the right-wing, or sanghis, or bhakts, or chaddiwallahs.  “There is a reason why liberals are derogatorily referred to as pseudo-secular, pseudo-intellectual and pseudo-liberal,” claims Bhagat. “For their agenda is not to be liberal. Their agenda is to look down on the classes that don’t have the global culture advantage.”  He goes on to say that “If, for insta

Standing between yesterday’s history and tomorrow’s mystery, he clung to the wings of a dream with a hope born anew. Hope was the last item in Pandora’s box. Hope is the well that the desert hides somewhere within it. But he saw his companions falling on the way, falling dead. They had hope, they had dreams, that they would be free next Christmas. When Christmas passed, they postponed their dream to next Easter. Easter too came and went. Too many broken promises of hopes and dreams break the wings. Break the heart. Face the reality, he said to himself. We are in hell, that’s the truth. How to beat the heat, find the ways. That’s the real hope. Hope is not a longing. Hope is not a dream. Hope is the toil that breaks the shackle bit by bit. The last item in Pandora’s box. Note : The poem was inspired by the Stockdale Paradox.  Admiral Jim Stockdale was a United States military officer held captive for eight years during the Vietna