Tomichan Matheikal's blog

No great leader emerges unless there is a crisis.  Mohandas Gandhi would have remained a mediocre lawyer had not the freedom struggle discovered the leadership qualities in him.  Abraham Lincoln would not have secured his present place in history without the crisis that challenged his potential in the form of the Civil War. Mr Narendra Modi has his historical opportunity now to prove his station in history.  India is faced with a crisis called nationalism. Nationalism, by definition, is excessive devotion to the interests of a particular nation-state.  It is valid when there is a threat to the autonomy of the nation-state.  India is not facing any such threat now.  Yet nationalism has become a craze among a sizeable section of the population.   When there is no threat to the nation, the only other reason for nationalist sentiments to breed and spread is a desire to dominate.  It is an urge to impose a certain culture or religion or some such thing over the others.  What

Book Review Title: Maximum City: Bombay Lost & Found Author: Suketu Mehta Publisher: Penguin Books, 2004 Every city has a fascinating history that lies beneath its imposing concrete edifices.  It is the history written on invisible pages by people who will never appear in the actual history books, people like gangsters and prostitutes.  And the person on the street too.  Suketu Mehta’s magnum opus unravels that invisible history of Mumbai in a gripping narrative that reads almost like a novel. The book is divided into three parts.  Part 1, titled ‘Power’, constitutes almost half of the book and is about the people who actually wield the power in the city.  The book speaks about the Mumbai of 1990s and hence this part begins with the riots that assailed the city soon after the Babri Masjid demolition in Dec 1992.  The Muslims in Mumbai reacted against the Babri Kasjid demolition and Bal Thackeray’s Shiv Sena was quick to exploit the situation for political gain

“Have I gone mad?” Alice wonders in Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland.  And the answer she gets is: “I’m afraid so; but let me tell you something, the best people usually are.”  If she were not mad, she wouldn’t have travelled in Wonderland, in the first place.  That’s another argument Alice gets in the classical novel. The world of literature is a world of madness.  A world of dreams, let us make it more acceptable.  All good literature is the author’s way of dealing with the demons within him/her.  Imagine Shakespeare were alive today’s India.  How would he dramatise what is happening in the country?  One young man who fought for getting certain benefits for his caste or community was thrown in prison labelled as “antinational”.  Another young man who rather unimaginatively questioned the hanging of a person whose crime was not proved conclusively even by the Supreme Court’s own implicit admission is now facing the charge of sedition.  It is happening in a country which is boasting