Tomichan Matheikal's blog

One of the paradoxes of human life is that society corrupts but isolation destroys.  While critiquing Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness , J H Stape points out a number of related paradoxes.  Civilisation is a hypocritical veneer over savagery; yet it is a valuable achievement to be vigilantly guarded. Morality is a sham; but without it human beings become sham humans. Awareness is superior to ignorance; yet ignorance can be bliss in many ways. A person who sells his soul does at least have a soul to sell, while most people who try to redeem their souls through quotidian religious practices do not have a soul at all.   The latest Indispire theme [ Human beings need someone in their life. At least a person to ask occasionally, how one feels now. What's your say on it? ] brought to my mind these paradoxes. The theme is essentially about relationships. It can be rephrased as: Can we live alone? Do we need at least one companion? Hermits live alone. However, their god(s) an

“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of all?” The Queen stood before the mirror and asked as usual.  The response was also the usual one: “My Queen, you are the fairest one of all.” The Queen was never tired of this exercise which went on ad infinitum, ad nauseam.  But the nausea was mine.  Only mine. The Queen, like most people, relished the flattery mistaking it for truth. “You accuse me wrongly,” complained the Mirror. No, it was not a complaint really. I took it as a complaint because I, like most people, judge others according to my own nature. I have a tendency to complain and so I think others also are like that. But the Mirror is not like me. It merely makes statements and not opinions stained by emotions. It tells the truth, in simple words. I don’t tell too many truths, like most people. But unlike most people, I can’t flatter. When I see something unfair or unjust I am tempted to point it out though I, like most people, learnt that it was wise not to t

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.