Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Though India’s own Entrepreneur Baba keeps denouncing everything foreign as unhealthy for the holy people of Bharat, Gujarat Gauseva and Gauchar Vikas Board have imported Egypt’s own Cleopatra as the model of beauty for Bharatiya nari .  According to these Gujarat gaurakshaks, 1.      Cleopatra was the most beautiful woman in the world. 2.      Cleopatra used cow’s milk for bathing. 3.      Therefore the Indian women should use cow’s dung and urine for enhancing their beauty. Don’t ask me what the logic is in that syllogism.  Where on earth have you found logic in any religious assertions and scriptural truths?  Take it on faith.  Faith is “belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel,” as defined by the Devil’s own immortal Ambrose Bierce.  Forgive me for borrowing a foreign definition; Indians are yet to acquire that sort of sense of humour – we are still steeped in bovine scatological aesthetics. Cleop

There’s a lot that India can and should learn.  For example, our terrible lack of civic sense.  We think that public spaces are enormous garbage bins, spittoons or even toilets.  People are treated no better than these public spaces.  We have no qualms about stepping on other people’s toes in order to move ahead in our life.  The most terrible vice is what I call the Indian missionary zeal. That is our typical instinct for poking our nose into other people’s affairs and then giving them unwanted and unwarranted counsels.  Like the missionary who is consumed by the divine zeal to save souls, we go around seeking what’s to be corrected in the other person’s behaviour.  I too possessed this obnoxious zeal for some time in my life.  But I was fortunate enough to have too many people around me who possessed it a million times more than I did.  So they kept a tab on me with a religious zeal that would have put the real missionaries to shame.  And there were the real missionarie

In his well-known book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Samuel P. Huntington implied that peace was an impossible dream.  “People are always tempted to divide people into us and them,” he wrote.  For example, let us assume that the Saffron Brigade succeeds in creating a Hindutva India after the present  face-off with Pakistan is surmounted.  Let us imagine an India where everyone abides by the principles of Hindutva.  Will it be a peaceful nation?  Huntington would say that we would soon start dividing ourselves into us and them, us being the dominant sections and them being the marginalised sections.  That’s how human nature is.  There is no escape from clashes. Huntington has evidences from history to substantiate his argument.  “World War I was the ‘war to end wars’ and to make the world safe for democracy,” he writes.  What actually happened, however?  Communism and fascism with their various versions of dictatorship.  Not democracy as dreamt by

Dear Mr R K Chaturvedi, It is very heartening to know that under your leadership CBSE is planning to make certain vital policy changes . As a teacher with a fairly long experience with CBSE schools, I am immensely happy to know that you have decided to review the policies regarding the class 10 exams and the Continuous Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE). Source First of all, please make the Board exams compulsory in class ten as it used to be earlier.  But make the exams more meaningful.  Assessment is not merely a process for providing a certificate of merit to every student.  It is to identify the skills and strengths of students in the various subjects she has been learning for ten or more years.  It is not very difficult to initiate an assessment system that evaluates the knowledge and skills as well as creativity of the students instead of merely checking bookish knowledge or rote learning.  In the last few years, CBSE had made the whole assessment absolutely ridic

Fiction The passengers were turning the air-conditioner knob of flight SW 2552 from Ahmedabad to Delhi when the announcement came.  “We regret to inform you that the air-conditioning of this flight will not function properly for a while due to a technical hitch which is being rectified.  We solicit your cooperation and regret the inconvenience caused to you in the meanwhile.” “The air-conditioning will not work till we reach Delhi,” Shiv Kumar heard the passenger sitting next to him say. “Why?” asked Shiv Kumar. “Didn’t you see the VVIP passenger for whom the flight was delayed by two hours?” “Yup. That’s Khushi Ram Baba, isn’t it?” Who did not know Khushi Ram Baba?  He was a godman who was in jail for some time for raping one of his devotees.  The news had become a notorious controversy discussed in great detail by all the news channels in the country.  The godman reportedly fell ill while in jail and needed specialised treatment.  So he was being taken to

E-tailers like Flipkart, Amazon and Snapdeal are doing brisk business this festival season.  According to a report in today’s Times of India , Flipkart sold half a million items within the first hour of launching its Big Billion Days event yesterday.  Amazon India sold 1.5 million units in the first 12 hours of its “Great Indian Festival” sale.  Snapdeal had 11 lakh buyers in the first 16 hours. Pakistan is trying to nibble away India with the teeth and nails of terrorists and India is celebrating consumerism.  Consumerism is certainly not as malevolent as terrorism but it isn’t a virtue anyway.  A few years back Professor Galen V. Bodenhausen of Northwestern University concluded after a psychological research that “Irrespective of personality, in situations that activate a consumer mind-set, people show the same sorts of problematic patterns in well-being, including negative affect and social disengagement.” Consumerism makes people more greedy and selfish . My own ob

A recent report by the Institute for Economics and Peace found that there were only just ten countries in the world which were currently free from conflict or war.  Peace is a distant dream on our planet which is still inhabited by people who are no better than the primitive savages.  Use of sophisticated weapons does not make the violence civilised. On the contrary, our weapons as well as our attitudes are infinitely more destructive than those of the savages. 13.3 percent of the globe’s total economic activity, $13.6 trillion, is spent on wars and related activities.  That is the equivalent of $1876 for every person in the world.  In Indian terms, everyone in the world could get Rs 125,000 if we could build up a world of peaceful coexistence. Mahatma Gandhi was the greatest apostle of peace during his lifetime if not in the entire history of mankind. Wars begin in the minds of people.  Gandhi said that in slightly different words.  The Preamble to the Constitution o