Tomichan Matheikal's blog

‘Secular’ and ‘communal’ are bad words in India unlike in any other part of the world.  Most countries in the world are secular in the sense they don’t have state religions; they keep politics and religion apart from each other.  ‘Communal’ means belonging or related to a community and has no negative connotations except in India.  Source We Indians are queer indeed.  We elected a party to power in the Centre because it promised to deliver us development .  But from the time the party started governing us, we started entertaining ourselves by abusing some people as ‘secular’ or ‘pseudo-secular.’  The latter term seems to have gone out of fashion. The country is polarised today into the ‘secular’ and the ‘communal.’  If you believe in some religion or god, you are communal.  If you demand peace and prosperity, you are filthy secular.  Rajnath Singh, our Home Minister, wants to cleanse the Indian vocabulary of secularism.  He tried to sound profoundly philosophical by a

Delhi is a city of flyovers and high-fliers.  People from all over the country are driven to the welter of opportunities that the National Capital Region offers with the magnanimity that the emperors of the walled city displayed to their favourite courtiers and courtesans.  Anyone who has the inclination and the drive will find his or her place in Delhi sooner than later – under the flyover if not above it.  Sprawling landscape around Qutub Minar The loves we share with a city are often not very upfront.  What drives Delhi are not merely the well-maintained roads and flyovers and the exquisite metro service but also the secret gratifications it offers in the sprawling malls with their multiplexes and the greenery that throbs in the woodlands that dot the city’s map with an unusual excess of nature’s bounty.  You can drive a dilapidated Bajaj scooter or a luxurious BMW and be at home in the anonymity of Delhi’s crowded vastness.  You can wear a cheap outfit bought from the s

My favourite novelists are those whose characters went on some wild goose chases, looking for oases in the mirage of life.  Albert Camus, Franz Kafka, and Dostoevsky have remained on the top of my list for long.  Jose Saramago’s The Gospel according to Jesus Christ and Javier Marias’s Infatuations captured my fancy later.  But one writer who has remained above them all for long is Nikos Kazantzakis.  His novels explore the conflict between the body and the soul, between “god and man” as he put it.  The Last Temptation of Christ, Christ Recrucified , and Saint Francis explore that conflict brilliantly.  However, the author’s earlier novel, Zorba the Greek , is what strikes me as the best.  Kazantzakis Zorba presents the classical Greek dichotomy between the Apollonian and the Dionysian.  Apollo is the god of reason and control, while Dionysius revels in the wild passions.  In the novel, Zorba is a worker who is taken on as an assistant by the narrator who is a young intel