Tomichan Matheikal's blog

All of us carry a lot of stories within us.  Quite many people just bury them and get on with life which is an exacting dictator.  They get used to the endless agonies and the intermittent ecstasies.  Some offer the stories to their gods and derive the much needed solace.  A few with irresistible egos choose to write them.  I belong to that tribe of egotists who think that their stories have some relevance for others too. That’s why I chose to publish a collection of my short stories, The Nomad Learns Morality .  The book had some good reviews from fellow bloggers.  Let me take the liberty to quote a few of them. “... every story hits your mind hard and impels you to replay it all over again in your mind to join the dots of deeper meaning held within,” says Namrata Kumari , author of Change Your Beliefs to Change Your Reality . An old friend (“old” merely because I hardly have contacts with people now) who works with a national newspaper once told me that I was a perver

One of the flames that fluttered on our terrace in Delhi in a Diwali night It’s only when the greetings came via Whatsapp that I realised it was Diwali.  Saturday is a holiday anyway and I used it for completing the works set aside for the day as usual.  The work took me to two towns on either side of my village.  There was nothing in either of the towns to remind one of Diwali.  It was business as usual.  Not even an extra lamp was seen anywhere.  No diyas which were ubiquitous in Delhi where I lived a decade and a half before I chose the quietness of this village.  No crackers which the Delhiites insisted on calling ‘bombs’ – “bum,” in fact.   No, I don’t miss the diyas or the bums . I like this quietness.  I love the purity that wafts into my lungs.  I used to conceal myself at home during both Diwali and Holi while I was in Delhi.  Both these festivals are conspicuous by their absence in Kerala except maybe in the big cities where people from other states celebrate them

“Zero was one of the greatest inventions in human history,” I remember one of my mathematics teachers telling us at St Albert’s college, Ernakulam.  Without zero we would have reached nowhere beyond some letters like X and M and C which were employed gratuitously in the Roman arithmetic.  Zero simplified and complexified mathematics at once.  It made easy not only counting but also all mathematical operations such as multiplication and division.  Just imagine division, for example, in the Roman system.  MMXLVI divided by IXCMXXXIII.  Wow, that is 1946 divided by 9933, after the invention of zero.  And the answer is 0.19591261451.  Imagine that figure in the Roman numerals.  Your imagination would go bust.  There was no decimal system before the arrival of the great zero. Take any number.  Say 20.  20 ÷ 20 = 1. 20 ÷ 10 = 2.  20 ÷ 4 = 5.  The smaller the divisor, the greater the quotient.  Take a big divisor like, say, 10000.  20 ÷ 10000 = 0.002.  Now apply this logic: as t