Tomichan Matheikal's blog

A lot of people are going to be unemployable within a decade or two.   Computers and other machines will do most work.   Even the oldest profession of prostitution will be mechanised thanks to sexbots .   Yuval Noah Harari (author of Sapiens and other books) says in his recent article in The Guardian that it is not a question of being unemployed so much as about being unemployable . A lot of people won’t just possess the skills required to be employed anywhere.  Harari said it!  What will governments do with such “useless” people?   Well, if we go by the signs of the times ‘useless’ people will have to follow Darwin’s theory about survival of the fittest and become extinct.   Suicide is already a major cause of death today.   According to Suicide.org , over one million people commit suicide worldwide each year.   On average, one person dies by suicide every 40 seconds somewhere in the world.   The number of failed suicide attempts is much higher.   The world isn’t

Saffron-clad ‘Rapist’ Gets Fitting Moksha is the major headline in the Kochi edition of today’s Times of India .   The report is about one Swami who calls himself Gangesananda Theerthapadar.   The Swami’s penis was cut off by a 23 year-old woman who claims that the ‘holy’ man had been raping her since she was fifteen years old.   At first the Swami told the doctors that he had cut off his penis since it was an “unwanted” organ (thus justifying the ‘moksha’ in TOI’s headline).   Eventually he had to admit the truth when questioned by the police.   The woman had already confessed to the police. Gangesananda Theerthapadar with Kummanam Rajasekharan, President of Kerala BJP Most people in Kerala seem to be happy with what the woman did if we go by the panel discussions that took place on Malayalam news channels yesterday.   A lawyer justified the deed saying that self-defence, defence of one’s honour, justifies certain violence.   Even the Chief Minister of Kerala, Mr Pina

Sitting in the cosiness of my little home, I have explored the mystery of the cosmos, encountered Schrodinger’s cat, chatted with Baruch Spinoza, witnessed Antony and Cleopatra melting Rome in the Tiber, travelled among the arid mountains of Afghanistan where hooded faces sought god in the barrels of guns, and listened to the music of the stars.   And accomplished a lot more, all thanks to books. I love books more than people simply because it is easier to understand the former whether they be fiction or non-fiction.   When it comes to fiction I like the kind which explore life in depth.   I like fiction spiced up with philosophy, history and possibly a little mystery too.   Good fiction takes us through the dark labyrinths in the human psyche.   Even psychology has not understood the human motives better than Dostoevsky or Joseph Conrad or Javier Marias.   The most sacred religious scriptures cannot refresh my soul as does Nikos Kazantzakis or Franz Kafka. Jose Saramag