Tomichan Matheikal's blog

When you’ve learnt to really care, the noises and gestures cease to matter.   The slogans sound absurd.   Rhetoric is out of place.   Any god is okay as long as the god supports the wellbeing of everyone around. If your god and creed become a cause for even one person’s sorrow, be assured that the god is false, the creed is false.   If your prayers don’t envelope the entire world around you, they are mere longings of a selfish creature even if they are addressed to a god and follow the formulas prescribed by a creed. When the tree becomes a mystery, the shower a revelation, and each person out there a spark of divinity, you don’t need temples to worship.   Rather the gods will fold their hands before you in respect.   And your heart overflows with humility. Death need not be the end. Death need not be a transit to hell or heaven or any such place.   Death can be a fulfilment, the fulfilment of your real self without the layers put on it by gods and creeds and their

Like Vaclav Havel, I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist.   Everything does not end well.   Nor does everything end badly either.   I have felt the constant surge of hope in my breast that things will improve.   Like, maybe we will have a good political leader who can unite the nation while preserving its endless variety.   Or that poverty will be eradicated and people will live with dignity.   “Life without hope is an empty, boring, and useless life,” said Havel. We cannot strive for anything without a fair share of hope within us.   However, one of my favourite authors, Albert Camus, derided hope as “the last item in Pandora’s box.”   Pandora’s box brought all the evils to mankind, according to Greek mythology.   Zeus kept the last evil, hope, hidden in the box.   Hope is the greatest source of trouble, philosopher Nietzsche had argued and Camus borrowed the argument.   Hope makes people anticipate an ultimate reward like heaven.   Such hope diminishes the value of thi

In his article in today’s Indian Express , Vijay Singh laments the jingoism that marks election speeches of presidential candidates in France.   “Once upon a time, presidential candidates making election speeches spoke of lofty ideals, their vision of history and the world,” he reminisces.   One of the French presidential candidates, Marie Le Pen, harped on the strings of “xenophobia, Islamophobia, immigrant-phobia, anti-Europeanism, anti-globalisation.”   ‘France for the French’ is a popular slogan now. Image from OutlookIndia Donald Trump wants an America of only Americans. The right wing in India is going out of its way to create Hindustan in place of the heterogeneous India. Various Islamic organisations have been trying for quite some time to fabricate a Caliphate in the whole world. It’s interesting to ask the questions like who the Americans are really or who the Indians.   With German ancestry from his father and Scottish ancestry from his mother, Trump is