Tomichan Matheikal's blog

A country is really free only when its citizens are free.  Freedom is not merely deliverance from foreign occupation.  Freedom is deliverance from poverty, injustice and other social evils as well as personal evils such as greed and jealousy which give birth to corruption of all sorts.  India is yet to be free.    There are millions of people in India who go to bed hungry even after seven decades of independence.  There are millions who don’t have access to basic healthcare.  Our public distributions systems and primary healthcare systems are abject failures.  The country is still enslaved by poverty.  Can we call it a free country? A man who has to carry the dead body of his wife on his shoulders for kilometres because he cannot afford to hire a vehicle should shake us out of our smugness.  He is a poignant symbol of the callousness that marks a governance which gives more importance to cows, idols and myths. India needs deliverance from its holy cows and myths.  It i

The worst sin is the refusal to confront one’s inner demons.  Redemption lies in accepting those demons and learning to grapple with them.  This is the fundamental theme of Khaled Hosseini’s celebrated novel, The Kite Runner . “... a boy who won’t stand up for himself becomes a man who won’t stand up to anything.”  Rahim Khan, one of the characters, tells Amir the protagonist. Rahim was actually quoting the words of Amir’s father who had assessed his son when the latter was a boy.  Amir never stood up for himself because there was always Hassan, his childhood friend, to stand up for him.  Hassan had no inner demons shelved away neatly in any inner recess of his consciousness. He confronted life as it presented itself to him.  When it was necessary to fight bullies, he did so bravely.  He did the fighting on behalf of Amir too.  But Amir betrayed him.  Amir surrendered to the demon of cowardice.  Every surrender to the inner demons leaves one with guilt.  Amir’s father

Moral Police struck again in Kochi, Kerala.  This time it is men belonging to Shiv Sena who went on a rampage.  They used canes to drive away the youngsters who were allegedly indulging in “immoral activities.”  Marine Drive in Kochi is too public a place for any couple to indulge in any conspicuously immoral activity.  It is possible that some youngsters crossed certain lines drawn by the (hypocritical) conservatism that marks the social life of Kerala.  But who are the Shivsainiks to wield canes when not even parents are allowed to use physical punishment on children?  Kerala is a state that sends teachers to jails for punishing students.  How come some politicians beat young students with canes in front of the police? Source: Deccan Chronicle The first question that comes to mind is what Shiv Sena is doing in Kerala.  Bal Thackeray founded that organisation for defending the Marathi pride?  Eventually it became an organisation of thugs and goons who perpetrated many atro

The world belongs to winners.   Losers have no place in it.   If you are a loser, learn to pretend at least, pretend to be a winner; otherwise you will be an outcast, part of the debris. America became a winner in the 20 th century by bossing over other countries.   There was no morality or ethics in the way they achieved the victory.   Not in the way they treated the natives of that land.   Not with respect to the Blacks.   Today the typical American is ready to kill their perceived enemies – the Asians, for example.   But the plaque at the base of   the Statue of Liberty will go on to proclaim with the magnanimity of a typical American televangelist who is also a close friend of President Trump: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the  wretched  refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless,  tempest-tossed  to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" Israel is a winner today.   Having bombarded thousands of

India, under Narendra Modi, is turning more and more Right.   Right wing organisations and groups are becoming hyperactive and imposing their truths on others.   The recent activism of ABVP in some Delhi colleges is just one of the many examples of criminal imposition of one’s beliefs and notions on others.   What is wrong the Right wing is precisely their claims about truths and morality.  They assume that only their beliefs and assumptions are the truths.  Only their practices are moral.  They will decide which god(s) others will worship, what food they will eat, or even what kind of dresses are permissible. Variant thinking is forbidden.  Anybody who questions the Right wing notions is portrayed as antinational and assaulted.  Dissent is treason.  Most of the slogans raised by ABVP recently in Delhi are striking illustrations of skewed notions and thinking processes.  Examples: ‘ Desh main jo rehna hoga, vande mataram kehna hoga, ’ and ‘DU against anti-nationals.’

Book Review Title: Disaster Falls: A Family Story Author: Stéphane   Gerson ISBN 978-1-101-90669-9 Death of a child is a tragedy that can alter the life of the family members in unpredictable ways.  The tragedy becomes even more intense when a parent is involved in it.  The author of this book lost his eight-year old son, Owen, during a rafting trip on the Green River.  The father and the son were navigating the rapids using a ‘duck boat’ which met with an accident, “an unfortunate alignment of circumstances.”  The father was saved and the little boy died.  Pain “mixed with regret, bewilderment, disappointment – and guilt in all guises,” writes the author.  “Guilt for signing the release and letting him board the ducky.  Guilt for not bringing Owen home. Guilt for failing to uncover new memories. Guilt for allowing sorrow to overshadow Owen....” The book is an exercise to deal with the sorrow as well as the guilt feeling.  It took a long while for the family t

There is an umbilical relationship between language and culture.  Language is one of the most visible or tangible expressions of culture.  That’s why the language of the dominant culture gains ascendancy in the world.  English is the world’s lingua franca today because of two reasons primarily.  One, it was the language of the dominant coloniser.  Wherever the coloniser went, his language too went.  If the French had more colonies than Great Britain, French would have been today’s global language.  Two, the dominance of Western culture, particularly science and technology which revolutionised the 20 th century world. In 21 st century, people seem to be getting sated with technology.  Science was never a common man’s cup of tea, let alone a more invigorating drink.  The 21 st century is facing a vacuum because of the lack of that invigorating drink, the kind that spiritual gurus spoke about time and again.  India has a chance to fill the vacuum.  If India can fill t