Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Fiction “We can’t postpone the delivery anymore,” Shiv Kumar told his wife. Lakshmi’s labour pain had started long ago.  A week ago, to be precise, the day after the Prime Minister had declared all high denomination currency of the country invalid.  There was only one private hospital in the small town near their home where delivery cases would be entertained.  That hospital flatly refused to admit patients who didn’t carry valid currency. “We can pay by debit card,” pleaded Shiv Kumar. “Sorry, we don’t have that facility yet.  Take your wife to the government hospital.  They will accept invalid currency.” Lakshmi flatly refused to go to a government hospital.  “I won’t have my son born amidst filth and that too paid for by invalid currency.” Son, yes, they knew it was a son and not a daughter they were going to beget.  Lakshmi had conceived after they had undergone the Divya-Putrasanjeevani treatment carried out by Gurudev Baba who had miraculous cures for

Book Review We live in a world in which “fair is foul and foul is fair” much more than in Shakespeare’s time.  Good people often become victims of foul systems or villainous individuals.  What if some good people are also shrewd enough to understand the hazards underlying the system and come forward to help the good but helpless people? This is an interesting question raised by Madhav Mahidhar’s murder mystery, Blood in the Paradise – A tale of an impossible murder .  The book is a straightforward murder mystery, a suspense thriller and a tremendously gripping read.  It is literally unputdownable because the police questionings and the court trials are riveting.  Madhumitha who has an unhappy married life as her husband Vikas Nandan became an alcoholic and womaniser decides to end her life along with those of their little twin daughters.  She survives, however, and the children have not been administered the poison yet.  But the husband dies absorbing the same poison

When the going is tough, exhortations are the cheapest. In the wake of the currency crisis, Baba Ramdev has asked us to starve for a week like the soldiers at the borders .  “ When there is a war, soldiers face many hardships and starve for weeks. Can't we, for welfare of the nation, endure this hardship for a few days?" Ramdev asked. The donation box opened in a church in Kerala A church in Kerala opened up its donation box to the public.  People were allowed to take the change available so that they could meet their urgent needs.  That’s better than doling out exhortations.  What’s religion if it only preaches?  Ramdev is a man who owns a business empire whose assets run into thousands of crores of rupees.  Could he not set some examples by providing medicine and food free to some deserving people instead of merely dishing out an exhortation?  Every good deed spreads more positive vibrations than a million exhortations? My personal experience with the demonet

Money is a game changer.  Is PM Modi playing a big game with the currency MODIfication?  West Bengal BJP deposited Rs 3 crore days before PM Modi declared high denominations as black money .  We can be quite sure that PM Modi’s friends such as Ambani and Adani were also informed about the deal earlier.  Ambani, for example, opened up Jio with a lot of freebies a few days prior to PM Modi’s announcement. Nothing comes free in this world. Our Conqueror Congress had too much money in the black.  It became the most corrupt party in India under the leadership Sonia Gandhi and her Amul Rahul.  Rahul goes around attracting media attention (media is a bunch of gossipers wearing the latest cut of the coat) posing in front of some crowded ATM counter and saying that he can’t change his 500 rupee notes.  His party’s assets were burned on the banks of Ganga and Yamuna, the most holy and most polluted rivers in the world.  That is the real game.  You burn the enemy in/on his/her own hol

Source The house on the hill had always fascinated Rahul.  But he never dared to go there.  No one did.  Because they said it was haunted.  Haunted by fairies. “Miss, aren’t fairies wicked?”  Rahul asked his teacher one day.  She, the English teacher, had just narrated a fairy tale in the class.  It was the story of a beautiful fairy that went around playing little mischievous tricks on people in order to teach them a lesson.  Her name was Pansy.  She also helped people when they were in need. “Fairies are not wicked,” answered the teacher.  “They are just mischievous.  Like children.” Rahul decided to visit the house on the hill and meet the fairy who lived in it. His heart was pounding when he stood in front of the house.  The house looked like an old palace.  Old it was, yet clean too as if someone had been maintaining it regularly.  But the fountain in the front yard gave the impression of desolation.  It was not working.  Probably it never did in the last man

The day Donald Trump strutted proudly to the White House, The Guardian concluded an article about Trumpism with the following paragraph: The religious right is in retreat, and the political appeal of free-market fundamentalism is fading. Republican strategists will now turn to Trumpism to replenish the well, enlisting its many supporters and sympathizers as foot soldiers for a new era of rightwing ascendancy. Now that Trump has reached the White House, the era of Trumpism has just begun. Source: Trump As Lord Vishnu? How Hindus In America Are Campaigning For Donald Trump Some sort of right wing balderdash always holds sway over collective imagination whether in America or India.  Religion may be losing its traditional sheen.  But it keeps reincarnating in the form of gau mata or Trumpism or something of the sort. But is religion really “in retreat”?  This is one question that refused to leave me after reading the Guardian article yesterday.  So I researched using

Book Review Paul Beatty’s Booker-winning (2016) novel, The Sellout , is hilarious satire that makes fun of many things that America holds sacred.  But the satire and its fun are so much American that many Indian readers may find it hard to comprehend.  Frankly, I had to refer to the internet scores of times in order to understand the allusions that the novel carries on almost every page. The book and the author The narrator of the novel referred to by only his surname, Me, is facing a trial in the Supreme Court for keeping a black slave.  Me is black himself. The slave he keeps is Homini, the last of the Little Rascals actors still alive.  Homini wanted to be a slave.  It helps him retain his African-American identity.  The whiplash on his back makes his back feel good though his heart feels good while living in a Black-only area.  The narrator also has a strong though complex affiliation with Dickens, a Black-only ghetto.  Me’s father was a sociologist who used th