Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Reading Mexico: Stories by Josh Barkan will make one think that Donald Trump’s demand for the border wall is justified.   Mexico comes across in these 12 stories as a country of drug dealers and their mafia along with prostitutes and quite many people who resort to violence without too much provocation.   The stories are set in the capital city where “To live ... you have to pretend there aren’t many dangers” [‘Everything else is going to be fine’]. Each of the twelve stories shocks us with a different variety of danger.   In the very first one, ‘The Chef and El Chapo’, we meet “the most badass narco in the country” who is ushered into the Chef’s restaurant by a retinue of his AK-47 swinging guards for a uniquely tasty meal.   The Chef is under duress to prepare that exquisite meal the type of which the Boss has not tasted so far.   The reputation of the Chef is at stake.   Worse, his life as well as those of the clients present in the restaurant is in danger as the Boss

“I am your handiwork made flesh.  You took beauty and created hideousness, and out of this monstrosity your child will be born... I am the meaning of your deeds. I am the meaning of your so-called love; your destructive, selfish, wanton love.  Your love looks just like hatred.... I was honest and you turned me into your lie.  This is not me.  This is not me.  This is you.” Salman Rushdie’s character, Boonyi, in Shalimar the Clown , spits out the above dialogue to her husband Max Ophuls.  Relationships have the tremendous power to wreak such havoc on people.  Relationships can be devastating.  Relationships can be beautiful too.  It depends on the people involved, their attitudes and motives. Relationships are quite like chemical reactions.  The elements can enter into strong and beautiful bonds creating admirably different compounds.  But unlike in chemical compounds, the individuals should be able to retain their own unique personalities in human relationships.  In a g

Fiction The  first thing that greeted Govinda as he stepped out of home early in the morning was a spider web which stood right at the entrance to his house.  He had come out, as usual every morning, to pick up the newspaper that the delivery man would throw into the yard from the road. The spider web brought out the philosopher in Govinda.  His mind went on a contemplation trip.  Why did nature create spiders?  Just to make webs and trap insects.  Insects are created to be trapped in spider webs. What a fate!  What a futile life!  To eat and to be eaten.  And reproduce.  How redundant are these creatures?  Govinda wondered.  How redundant is life itself by and large? He thought of people.  Most people meant nothing to him: like the passengers who travelled in the same compartment in a metro train, for example.  They just jostle us along: into the compartment at one station and then out of it at another. And then we go on.  Jostling.  The jostling becomes more per

Through the haze of the twilight walked in Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s Little Prince.  He was still the same old Little Prince (LP).  That’s why he appeared in the twilight.  When they grow up they become princes or princesses of darkness. “The Universe is a crazy place,” said LP when I asked what he had learnt after so many years of wandering among the stars and meteors.  Just imagine your own situation, he said.  Right now you are moving at about a speed of 1500 km per hour.  “You mean the speed of the rotation of the earth?” I ventured to ask.  It is dangerous to ask questions to enlightened people.  You never know how they will take your questions. They live in a different universe altogether. Precisely, he said.  If the earth is rotating at a speed of about 1500 km per hour on its axis, you are moving at that speed, aren’t you? “The earth is also revolving around the Sun at about 30 km per second,” I said.  Indeed, he consented immediately.  So you are spinn

The beaten tracks belong to the poor, tired, huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of teeming shores. 1   Life’s thrills belong to those who trek on the Vesuvius.  To those whose ships dare the uncharted seas. 2 Toe the line if you want to be the winner in athletics.  But there’s little fun running between lines, in circles, over again along the same track.  The dandelions flutter longing to be touched, beyond the tracks.  The longing of dandelions will acquire wings and fly in search of new horizons.  If only we could be dandelions.  With longings that grow wings.  We’d leave the beaten tracks and circular races.  We’d discover new horizons.  New ecstasies. New truths.  Personal truths are like wings.  They carry us above narrow considerations of nationalism and jingoism.  Above political games and religious terrors.  Far away from the jargon of gurus who enslave.  Pick your chance.  And grow your wings. Let no shadow fall between th

Some days are like that: vacuous.  Nothing stirs in the consciousness.  Even the annual budget fails to rouse the spirit.  Nothing matters really.  “Earth to earth and dust to dust,” the cleric at the funeral service makes a ghostly apparition in the consciousness filling its foreground with what William James described as “a sense of surrender to the empty passing of  time.”  Shadows walk about in the haze of moonlight that has turned marmoreal for no reason.  Reason becomes a spectre that has put on dark goggles and a mocking smirk and gallops through the dying embers in your consciousness. Clop-clop-clippety-clop. Emptiness is unbearable.  Even if it is the DNA of life. Fill it.  With whatever you like.  Words, for example.  As I’m doing.

Mahatma Gandhi, whose death anniversary is commemorated today, is still relevant precisely because of the gulf between him and our contemporary leaders.  What sets Gandhi poles apart is the harmony or congruence that existed between his thought, word and deed.  He called that harmony ‘truth’.  He was a man of truth.  Since truth is not a fixed entity he experimented with it.  That is, he was constantly discovering truth.  His life was an ardent pursuit of truth.  He might have erred occasionally as any human being does however noble he or she may be.  But his pursuit was genuine.  He was genuine. The absolute lack of masks is what makes Gandhi as relevant as any genuinely spiritual leader would be at any time, even centuries after his or her death.  It is those who put on different masks to suit various occasions that need to separate religion from politics, public life from private life.  “My life is my message,” Gandhi asserted boldly because he never needed any mask at any