Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Put a few children on an island with no adults to supervise them.  Watch from a distance what they do.  In no time you will have to intervene in order to save them from themselves. William Golding wrote a novel on that theme.  Lord of the Flies , the novel by the Nobel laureate, tells the story of some children who were marooned on an island.  Soon savagery dominates their life.  The benign Ralph loses to the bullying Jack.  Evil triumphs.  There is no childhood innocence.   There is only the savagery that marks humanity essentially. Three years before Lord of the Flies was published, American literature was blessed with J D Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (1954) which told the story of a 16 year-old boy, Holden Caulfield, whose dream was to preserve children’s innocence from the necessary corruption of adults.  Holden ends up in the loony bin.  One has to lose innocence if one is to remain sane in the human world.  Growing up is necessarily to embrace evil or at least

There is too much productivity in our world.  We are bombarded with commodities.  Half of the TV time is dedicated to advertising commodities most of which are not necessary in anybody’s life.  Half of the newspaper space is similarly dedicated to redundancy. Shopping malls and popular markets bring us a lot of commodities which we don’t need really.   Suppose we change our focus from production and consumption to creation.  Suppose people start spending some time every day on creating something like a flower vase from waste material, a poem about the agony left by the religion of bombs, a short movie on the mobile camera... Well, each one of us can create something according to our taste and skills.  Create, not produce.  Creation is an act of love.  Production is mere commerce. The world will be a different place.  Qualitatively different. There will be more beauty than vulgarity. More refinement.  More happiness.

Fiction Devika's dreams were filled with flying reptiles.  Crocodiles and serpents soared heavenward on diaphanous wings.  They disturbed her sleep night after night.   "She wants the best of both worlds."  That was her father's interpretation of her dreams.  Seeing her swollen eyes in the morning, mother asked her what disturbed her sleep.  She told mother about the crocodiles and serpents with diaphanous wings that visited her night after night. Mother dutifully reported the matter to father.   "Both worlds?"  Mother did not understand.   "The reptiles belong to the earth.  Too much to the earth.  The wings belong to the heavens.  And diaphanous wings!"  He paused.  "Hmm... They belong to angels, I suppose."   Devika was reading a poem by Sara Teasdale when mother was trying to decode the link between the terrestrial reptiles and the celestial angels.   Stephen kissed me in the spring,   Robin in the fall,   But Colin onl