Tomichan Matheikal's blog

In Orhan Pamuk’s novel, My Name is Red , a dog takes offence when a religious preacher calls his enemies dogs.  “It is common knowledge that hajis, hojas, clerics and preachers despise us dogs,” says Dog who thinks that it is because the Prophet [“peace and blessings be upon him”] once displayed a special affection to a cat by cutting off a piece of his robe on which the cat was sleeping rather than disturb the creature.  Says Dog, “By pointing out this affection shown to the cat, which has incidentally been denied to us dogs, and due to our eternal feud with this feline beast, which even the stupidest of men recognizes as an ingrate, people have tried to intimate that the Prophet himself disliked dogs.” The dog knows that religious likes and dislikes can be shaped as easily as the scriptures can be interpreted variously to suit each one’s taste and motive.  The dog is religious too.  It is proud of the fact that a dog it was that guarded the seven young men who took refuge in

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