Tomichan Matheikal's blog

One of the most common responses of the BJP to criticism is to cite examples of similar deviation by the Congress.  For example, tell them that communal disharmony is on the rise after the party came to power and they will quickly cite the riots that followed Indira Gandhi’s assassination or other similar instances.  Tell them now that the imposition of President’s rule in Uttarakhand just a day prior to the scheduled trust vote is a cynical subversion of democracy and they will point to the imposition of Emergency by Indira Gandhi.  The BJP came to power promising us DIFFERENCE.  It promised us DEVELOPMENT.  It gave us dreams about a country that will fly on the wings of science and technology.  It promised us cleanliness.  We dreamt about RS 15 lakh in the accounts of each one of us, the black money brought back from wherever that is stashed away. While we dreamt, Vijay Mallya escaped with Rs 9000 crore from our banks! Nothing has changed, in fact.  As Arun Shourie, a

The movie, Fiddler on the Roof , is 45 years old.  Winner of three academy awards, the movie tells the story of a Jewish family in Russia of the early 20 th century.  The Tevye family is economically poor.  But Tevye is a god-fearing man.  He has a lot of questions to ask Yahweh but all in a childlike trust tinged with the adult’s irony.  He follows the rules and traditions of his orthodox religion as meticulously as he can.  When his daughters fall in love one by one against the tradition of their religion, Tevye is shocked initially but bows to the love that shines in the eyes of his daughters.  Finally, the family has to leave the place like the other Jews who are all evacuated.  One of the many evacuations that the Jews faced throughout their history which goes back to the biblical Exodus.  The eponymous Fiddler on the Roof is a symbol of the precarious situation of the Jews.  Perched perilously on the sloping roof, the fiddler has to produce his music which is his duty on

Book Review Title: The Blind Lady’s Descendants Author: Anees Salim Publisher: Penguin India 2015 Pages: 301 Price: Rs 399 A metaphorical blindness is part of most people’s lives.  We fail to see many things and hence live partial lives.  We make our lives as well as those of others miserable with our blindness.  Anees Salim’s novel which won the Raymond & Crossword award for fiction in 2014 explores the role played by blindness in the lives of a few individuals most of whom belong to the family of Hamsa and Asma.  The couple are not on talking terms for “eighteen years,” according to the mother.  When Amar, the youngest son and narrator of the novel, points out that he is only sixteen, Asma reduces it to fifteen and then to ten years when Amar refers to the child that was born a few years after him though it did not survive.  Dark humour spills out of every page of the book.  For example: How reckless Akmal was!  Sleeping with his mouth wide open righ

Fiction Warning: FOR ADULTS ONLY The beggar pulled him out of the rail track just in time.  As he fell on the side of the track, the train stormed past his ears like a bomb blast he had just missed. He stood up, brushed off the pain from some parts of his body, and blurted out to the beggar, “Fucker!” The beggar who had just picked up his one-string violin laughed as if he were Bhishma faced with Shikhandi .  Then he placed his violin on his shoulder and started playing a violent tune.  Almost like the Fiddler on the Roof .    “Why did you fuck my death?” he asked the beggar ignoring the enticement of his one-string music. The beggar grinned through the darkness of his mane and said, “It’s not your time, boss.  Give me the money for my next drink and wait for the next train.”  He stretched out his hand. “Fuck off!” he said. “Cliché,” said the beggar.  “Cliché.” “What?” “You are bored, aren’t you?  Bored of clichéd life?” He spat out another

Cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker has shown that people can go to any length and expose themselves to any risk merely to prove that the myths they live by are actually true.  The Brussels bombing is the latest episode in man’s quest for converting myths into truths. Myths are necessary for making life bearable.  How miserable would life be without the consolations offered by the pie that is awaiting us in the sky after death?  How can we survive without those gods at whose feet we can unload the burdens in our hearts? As long as gods remain painkillers and shock absorbers, they are harmless.  But the problem is when their worshippers want to impose their painkillers and shock absorbers as the only entities of the kind on everybody in the world.  Christianity did this for a whole five centuries from about 1050 to 1550 CE in the name of crusades.  Did the world become any better place for all those killings and brutality and conversions and what not? Today we have peo

Once I presented a copy of the book, Amen , by Sister Jesme to a couple who visited me.  A few days later I came to know that the husband had flung it out of the car as they were returning home.  “I won’t let such books in our home,” he said as he stopped the car near one of the many garbage heaps belonging to the Municipal Corporation. Sister Jesme’s book is not a particularly outstanding work in any way.  It shows that the Catholic Church is as corrupt as any human institution is.  It elaborates on the sins and human weaknesses that exist in the religious congregation to which the nun (Sister Jesme) belonged until she left it in disgust as well as the realisation that it was meaningless to continue living a life of sheer hypocrisy.  I gifted it to the couple because the lady had shown some interest in it when she saw it on my book shelf and also because the gentleman was very closely associated with the Church and would not allow any criticism of the Church within his hearing

Ghulam Nabi Azad did not really compare the terrorist outfit, Islamic State, with RSS.   He says he only mentioned the two in the same breath.   He was opposed to both. Though the IS and RSS may share a few things in common, putting them on two sides of the same balance is preposterous.  Tavleen Singh, in her column in The Indian Express , elaborates on that preposterousness and then goes on to assert that she grew up despising RSS.  This is what she says: I found their aggressive nationalism silly and their obsession with Hindu revivalism boring. I still do. I believe that reducing the vast wealth of Indian civilisation to a debate about beef is vandalism. Since Narendra Modi became Prime Minister, we have seen far too many of his partymen exhibit their complete ignorance about Hindu civilisation by spreading hatred against those who eat beef and believing that they do this in the cause of reviving Hindu thought from Vedic times. Most of them have learned their ideas from R