Tomichan Matheikal's blog

What’s new year except in your calendars and calculated measurements?  For me, there are only the cyclical motions.  When I complete one revolution round the sun you call it a year.  Is there really a beginning and an end in a cyclical motion? Have you ever watched a child drawing a circle with a compass?  He begins somewhere, a random point, comes back to it and continues a little more to make sure that the beginning is not seen.  Even the child knows that a circle doesn’t have a beginning.  Nor an end.  Like eternity.  Eternity is a cycle.  Have you ever thought of that? This is an endless motion for me, my life.  Your scientists have given it a beginning and calculated its likely end too.  Billions of years.  But what do years mean to me?  Mine is a cyclical motion round the sun.  The sun holds me to itself.  Yet I can’t ever get closer to it.  This distance between it and me is what makes my journey delightful.  There’s longing in this journey.  To get closer.  Occasi

2016 is bidding adieu having gifted us ‘post-truth’ as the word of the year, thanks to the Oxford Dictionaries.  Is the concept new, however?  Haven’t emotions and personal beliefs been more influential in shaping our ‘truths’ than objective facts throughout history?  Otherwise, why did religions and their gods continue to wield such power over us perennially?  Nationalism, Jihadism, Trumpism, Modiism, and a whole range of isms would not have succeeded as they did if objective facts held sway over shaping of public opinions. ‘Post-truth’ is just a euphemism for falsehood, deception, chicanery and all the lies that have dominated politics and human affairs from time immemorial.  There’s nothing new about it except that it’s a new word.  Only the word is new, not the concept, not the implications. Throughout history political leaders used various tricks to deceive their people.  We have words like Machiavellian and Goebbelsian which came from real people who used inhuman

Let alone acts of violence, every trace of evil is proof that mankind is still an unfinished product.  It is as if the evolution got stuck somewhere.  We have a highly evolved brain compared to the other animals.  But most human beings do not use the brain for promoting goodness, not even the welfare of our own species.  On the contrary, we compete with one another and are highly detrimental to our own species, to others as well as the planet.  The amount of money, energy and resources employed in destructive activities such as war and terrorism is much more than what is devoted to constructive and mutually helpful purposes.  In the process we also inflict much damage on the planet which sustains us.  Which other species is so self-destructive?  Yet we claim to have a sophisticated brain. Who is an evolved human being? An intellectual understanding of life and the world which instils compassion towards other creatures should ideally be the first and foremost character

Recently I saw a Christian catechism book which described Albert Einstein as a firm believer in God.  Nothing is farther from the truth. In his biography Einstein clearly states that his “deep religiousness” came to “an abrupt end” at the age of twelve when he realised that established authorities like the state and religions were deceiving people with “lies”.  As an adolescent Einstein developed a “mistrust of every kind of authority” because he could see through the falsehood that upheld the authorities.  Yet Einstein was religious in the sense that he saw sanctity in the universe.  “I believe in Spinoza’s* God,” declared Einstein, “who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and doings of mankind.”  Answering a scientist who questioned Einstein’s reported religious faith, Einstein wrote, “If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so fa

Tom, the Catholic priest who is pleading for his life in this video, was captured by Islamic terrorists in March. I still remember the hug I received from him a little more than a year before the tragedy befell him. We had met during an alumni gathering in Kochi. When the meeting was over and I was on my way home along with my wife, the latter made two remarks about Tom. "He looks like a saint," said my wife. I replied that he was different from most people. The saintliness that his face reflected was genuine.  My wife's second remark was that the hug he gave me was genuine too. The hug was not a mere formality. "We were good friends," I said.  Tom and I studied together for six years. In the first half of that period we were close to each other. Eventually his saintliness and my vanity couldn't go together. But we still remained good friends. At a distance. We respected each other. We loved each other too in spite of the individual d

An average person is more likely to kill himself than be killed by terrorism, illness or accidents.       Source Source Life is pain, said the Buddha.   Why to live then?   That would be the most fundamental question if we accept the Buddha’s enlightened truth.   Philosophers like Albert Camus wrote treatises on why we should live in spite of the pain, absurdity, or sheer ridiculousness.   The treatises are individual responses to the question about the meaning of life.   Each individual has to discover his/her own answer to the question, I think, unless one is satisfied with the readymade answers given by religions or such systems.  If suicide is the largest cause of death in the world, one implication is that there are too many individuals who are not able to find religious or similar readymade answers meaningful.  One of the basic biological facts is that life tends to sustain itself in spite of all odds.  Plants and animals will keep struggling against hea

Speaking during a function in Raigad yesterday, Prime Minister Modi threatened the nation with more “difficult decisions.”  From today's Times of India A couple of days back, Steve Forbes, Editor-in Chief of Forbes magazine condemned Mr Modi’s demonetisation as immoral and theft of people’s property.  A few days back, Wall Street Journal wrote that “Instead of factory openings or large new investments, the images that tell India’s current economic story include snaking lines outside banks, distressed workers migrating back to their villages, and tax raids on jewelers and officials caught with hoards of allegedly illicit cash.” Today is Christmas, a festival that marks the birth of a man in whose name a major religion came to be founded.  Christianity has always upheld suffering as a virtue.  It has relished imposing more and more rules and regulations, restrictions and penalties on its people.  Its priests and other leaders love to threaten the faithful with omi