Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Delivering a Martin Luther King Jr Memorial lecture, actor Kamal Haasan said that “incomplete minds that somehow manage to reach the seat of power” create inequality.  He went on to say that enlightened minds are with the poor.  Power is something that attracts only “incomplete minds,” generally.  Power is one way of completing oneself, filling up the blanks within.  Why don’t we find scientists, philosophers (writers), artists and other such people in politics running after power?  Probably, their minds are not so “incomplete.”  Or they find better means of filling the blanks within: by inventing something new, thinking new ideas or creating works of art.  Those who are incapable of such creative contributions hanker after power.  Boss over others and prove your worth! Imposing oneself on others is precisely what’s wrong with these incomplete minds.  We find them imposing their ideas, religion, culture, food habits, dress, anything and everything on others. Dacher K

Book Review Author:  Rakhi Jayashankar Publisher: Cyberwit.net Pages: 215 Waves in the sky narrates the story of six girls who studied together in the same school and were popularly known as the Canaries.  CANARY is an acronym for Charu, Ananya, Neha, Avantika, Raihana and Yami, the six girls whose story unfolds in the novel.  The girls grow up and go to different colleges and also learn about some betrayals that had occurred within the group when they were at school.  Not all friendships are genuine.  People have various motives for being part of a group and some of the motives may lead one to betray the group or some members of the group for one’s own personal interests.  Life is full of incidents that are born of betrayals by friends as well as relatives.  The novel explores some such betrayals or even plain murders.  Some of the murders can shock the male readers.  Are women capable of such cruelty?  Can a mother kill her own offspring? The back cover blu

Happiness is as simple as “a glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea.”  The Buddha is not required for arriving at enlightenment.  In fact, the kind of enlightenment brought by the Buddha can be anti-life.  The Buddha can be a demon within.   Zorba is the antithesis of the Buddha.  Zorba is the protagonist of Nikos Kazantzakis’s classical novel, Zorba the Greek .  The narrator of the novel is a young intellectual who has decided to bid goodbye to books for a while and take up active life.  He wants to be with people.  Zorba, an elderly man with boundless and unconstrained passion for life, becomes the narrator’s companion.  No, not just companion but his Buddha. A scene from the movie Zorba the Greek However, the kind of enlightenment that Zorba brings differs totally from what the Buddha had brought.  If life was “sorrow” for the Buddha, it is “trouble” for Zorba.  The highest point you can arrive at in life is not knowledge or

“When the state itself disregards the law, what is to be done?” is a question raised in the lead article of the latest Frontline .  The article is about the Chhattisgarh government’s oppression of the tribal people in order to snatch their lands and hand them over to the corporate bigwigs in the name of development. The authors argue that the BJP has converted many parts of the country into a laboratory for “neoliberal Hindutva” which combines “Hindutva communalism with a corporate-driven development agenda.”  Mission 2016 is the name of the game in Chhattisgarh.  It seeks to evict the Adivasis from the forests using various oppressive measures such as branding them as Maoists and torturing them.  Various new organisations have come up whose members roam the Adivasi regions, pull up people, demand answers, and threaten outsiders such as lawyers, journalists and activists. Why have governments turned so anti-people and pro-corporate?  There may be many answers.  Throughout h

A scene from the terrace of an apartment in Delhi Water is the foundation of life. 500,000 litre water was brought to Latur in Maharashtra yesterday by train from a distance of 350 km and each person in Latur got less than one litre. The cricket pitch and other places belonging to the privileged sections get water galore while the poor have to wait for the water trains to come with one litre of water for each person. Delhi is one place which taught me that success belongs to those who can wrench it mercilessly by hook or by crook. Now Maharashtra is teaching us a lesson about water.

Long ago, when our ancestors descended from the tree and started walking on the earth, we allowed religion to hijack everything from our entertainment to our morality, from our pains and joys to our gods and devils.  When the immensity of the cosmic mystery overwhelmed those primitive creatures, it was understandable that they sought solace in superstitions and rituals.  Today, when science has broken through most of the mysteries, revealing the principles of gravitation and quantum mechanics, unseating gods from their celestial thrones, replacing heaven and hell with black holes and stellar bodies, why does religion continue to inflict us with tragedies? For details: The Hindu The latest tragedy in a Kerala temple, like most other such tragedies in places of worship, is a man-made one.  The organisers and operators of the fireworks display flung all norms to the cosmic winds for the sake of enhancing the impressiveness of the show.  It’s a kind of competition.  Our temple

There is a branch of psychology called Cognitive Psychology according to which our thoughts, feelings and behaviour are interconnected.  In other words, our thinking is clouded by our feelings and/or attitudes, and our behaviour is determined by that cloud. Let us take an example.  A real one.  Smiley, please.  A religious leader with a big fan (devotee) following declares openly that he would have beheaded those people who refused to pay homage to Bharata Mata, if the law would not have punished him.  How would cognitive psychology assess the godman? The godman is suffering from a serious cognitive disorder, the cognitive psychologist would say immediately.  His thinking is terribly faulty.  His feelings and attitudes seem to be crude.  And hence his resultant behaviour (making the murderous statement from a public platform knowing that there are thousands of people listening to him with devotion) is neurotic. Bharat Mata is a symbol of the nation and as such deser