Tomichan Matheikal's blog

I wake up every morning to some WhatsApp messages from friends and well-wishers.  “There are only two ways of living life,” suggested one such message this morning, “Walk like you are the King or walk like you don’t care who the King is.”  The very next one from another friend (who messages me very rarely) belonged to the spiritual realms as usual: “In pride, in reas’ning pride, our error lies; All quit their sphere and rush into the skies. Pride still is aiming at the bless’d abodes, Men would be angels, angels would be gods.” The first message came from a friend who has entrepreneurial ambitions while the sender of the second one has spiritual aspirations. The first friend, presumably, sends bulk messages to all in the mailing list every morning and hence the messages may not be meant for me personally.  The second friend takes a personal interest in me as all spiritually ambitious people do.  Entrepreneurship is about managing the masses while spirituality is about savin

“It is God’s omniscience that helps Him to endure the sorrows of the world,” says the narrator of Francois Mauriac’s short story, A Man of Letters.   Why would any God endure this world of ours for so long had it not been for the empathetic understanding of the criminality that underlies the crown of His own creation?  The question begs a lot of other questions, of course.  Is there a God, did He (is it He really?) create the universe, was He aware of the evil that he was giving birth to while creating the human beings...?  Michelangelo's The Pieta Let us assume that some God created the universe for reasons similar to why Dostoevsky wrote Crime and Punishment or Michelangelo carved the Pieta : a creative urge.  Not the whole of creation is under the control of the creator because there are unconscious motives which underlie every creation.  Sublimation of the darkness within the creator is one of the motives of creation. The human beings seem to be the darkness that la

Book Review Title: Silent Realities Author: Ranjan Kaul Publisher: Niyogi Books, New Delhi, 2016 Pages: 214 It is not an easy job to fabricate arresting stories out of very ordinary characters.  The best feature of Ranjan Kaul’s short stories is that they engage us from the first line to the last.  We get glued to the characters.  There’s a rare kind of suspense that Kaul creates in his stories.  It is not the suspense we find in thrillers and other categories that usually make use of suspense.  It is rather the suspense that life carries inextricably with it particularly in the case of vulnerable characters. The reason why Kaul’s stories fascinate us is that the characters are all taken from the next street or the next door.  Ashalata who makes use of her little daughter to steal ladies’ handbags in the first story, The Handbag , Lallan who becomes a tragic victim of a corrupt and insensitive socio-political system [ Lallan ]and Hari who runs away from home beca