Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Ernest Hemingway, Nobel laureate in literature, loved life passionately.  He loved adventure and relished the big game safaris in Africa as much as sailing through the dangers in the ocean or even punching the opponent in amateur boxing. More so, he trusted people just to know if they were trustworthy.  Many of the adventures he embraced had the potential to kill him.  He survived two plane crashes during his last safari in Africa and read with considerable amusement the obituaries that appeared in the morning’s newspapers which had presumed his death. The Yogi, on the other hand, has no passions by profession.  He is supposed to be dispassionate.  He has conquered emotions and passions.  Rig Veda says that the whole spectrum of human passions ranging from enthusiasm and creativity to depression and agony, from the heights of spiritual bliss to the heaviness of earth-bound labour, belongs to the rank and file.  The Yogi has transcended these contrary forces.  Between the ex

A fellow blogger whom I requested for a review of my short story collection, The Nomad Learns Morality , turned down the request on the grounds that my stories were pessimistic.  “Howsoever wrongs have been done in the past and howsoever bleak the present may be appearing, optimism needs to be preserved in one way or the other, that's what I feel,” he wrote to me.  It is almost impossible to come across such candidness in today’s world.  I found my respect for this blogger friend increase manifold merely because he cared to express his opinion so frankly.  That’s my pessimism and my realism.  When I say “It is almost impossible to come across such candidness in today’s world”, I’m expressing my pessimism.  But my respect for the friend’s candidness is my realism.  Is it the duty of a literary writer to preserve optimism?  The lion’s share of the world’s best literature would be rendered trash if we answer in the affirmative.  From the great Greek classics to the contemp

There are some books which are unputdownable, yet they compel you to put them down in order to contemplate.  Every page is a bewitching invitation to turn over to the next.  Every line captures your fancy and you don’t want to leave the intoxication.  Yet your mind urges you to stop and take in a line here or a metaphor there more deeply.  One of the many books which did that to me (and will do it again when I read it again) is Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis. There is very little by way of plot in this novel.  There is the first person narrator who would rather choose a book on love than a beautiful woman who offers the experience of love to him.  Then there’s Zorba, the protagonist, who is a sixty year-old man with boundless passion for life.  He thinks that a woman sleeping alone is “a shame on all men.”  The intensity of Zorba’s passion for life can seduce women, notwithstanding his age.  He is a lover, fighter, adventurer, musician, cook, miner, and enlightener. 

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