Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Why is the Supreme Court so anxious to make Rahul Gandhi apologise for telling the truth?  What Mr Gandhi said was that “RSS people killed Gandhiji...”  What’s wrong in that statement?  The apex court says that it is “a collective denunciation.” It is. And what’s wrong in that? Wasn’t the RSS opposed to the Mahatma so thoroughly that it wanted to eliminate him? Nathuram Godse, Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare who hatched the conspiracy and planned everything meticulously sitting in the Retiring Room number 6 at Old Delhi Railway Station were all RSS people. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Union Home Minister when Gandhi was assassinated, wrote to Prime Minister Nehru that it was a fanatical wing of the Hindu Mahasabha directly under Savarkar that “[hatched] the conspiracy and saw it through.”  Both RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha celebrated Gandhi’s assassination by distributing sweets. Yes, Rahul Gandhi was absolutely right: it was RSS people who killed Gandhiji.  It was the organisation

Fantasy The witch looked like somebody I knew.  That’s why she didn’t scare me though I should have been scared since she resembled the woman whose hobby was messing up people’s lives.  No, the witch wasn’t wearing a sober-coloured sari like this woman I knew.  Nor was her hair silver grey.  In fact, her hair was red.  And her teeth were green unlike the pearly white teeth of the woman she reminded me of. She wore a ragged gown which smelt of cremation grounds.  In fact, there was nothing about her that matched this woman I knew. But she resembled her. It was her smile.  Yes, that smile was deadly.  You knew the smile was meant to kill.  Whenever this woman I knew smiled, somebody’s end was sure.  End does not mean physical death.  This woman was the boss of the institution where I worked for some time.  Whenever she smiled, somebody lost his or her job. And this woman made sure to fabricate some charge against the employee so that the latter wouldn’t dare to fight back.  He or

Shamsudheen Fareed, a Salafi preacher in Kerala, has decided that Onam, Christmas and other such celebrations are haram.  A lot more things are haram in his version of Islam.  Movies are haram.  Even trimming the beard is! When a person convinces himself that he possesses the ultimate truths, he is destined to live in a bundle of delusions.  Simply because there are no ultimate truths.  Except in science and other rigid systems.  Even in those systems, truths are amenable to corrections.  An Einstein corrected a Newton.  Einstein’s theories are also not ultimate truths.  When it comes to human life and affairs, truths are never ultimate.  We keep learning and understanding them in our own way.  Source Joseph Conrad’s celebrated character, Kurtz ( Heart of Darkness ), is a good example of someone who deluded himself with his own ultimate truths.  He thought he possessed the ultimate truths and he wanted to civilize the native Africans by giving them those truths.  The re

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

One of the persons encountered by Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s peripatetic Little Prince is the King of a tiny asteroid.  The King teaches Little Prince that “Accepted authority rests first on reason.  If you ordered your people to go and throw themselves into the sea, they would rise up in revolution.”  The King claims that he has the right to require obedience because his orders are reasonable.   Read the book here From whom will the King demand obedience, however?  Little Prince had noticed that the only inhabitant of the asteroid was the King.  He asks the King, “Over what do you rule?”   “Over everything,” the King answers promptly and makes a majestic gesture which sweeps everything including the stars and the planets.   “And the stars obey you?”  Little Prince is dismayed.   “Certainly they do,” tells the King.  “They do instantly and I do not permit insubordination.”   Little Prince makes a request.  He being very fond of sunsets would like to see one