Tomichan Matheikal's blog

When the doorbell rang, Intellectual wondered who it could be.   These days no one took Intellectual seriously.   “Oh! It’s you.   Come in.”   Intellectual opened the door.   The Party Spokesman walked in.   “As I told you on phone,” said Party Spokesman, “we’re ready to pay you the price you demanded.   Whatever you write hereafter will be in support of the party explicitly or implicitly.” Intellectual took the cheque offered by Party Spokesman.   “Advance payment.   The real payment will begin once we get to read your articles.” Intellectual felt something die within him.   But he knew he could laugh all the way to the bank hereafter.  

I usually put on a smile.   It’s easy for me because the people whom I meet usually are young students who return my smile with compound interest.   Young people love smiling faces and they are sure to reciprocate with more charming smiles.   When I come across adults, I have to make an extra effort to smile but I usually succeed. At least I’ve been assuming that I normally carry a smiling face.   That’s why I was surprised when a student of mine asked me the other day why I was so serious outside the school.   The world outside the school does not matter to me except when I have some business to do with it like buying vegetables or negotiating the traffic at some crowded junction.   I guess I don’t smile at the vegetable seller or the stranger at the traffic crossing.   I also guess that my student didn’t mean that.   Probably he noticed a drastic contrast between my face in school and the one outside.   Probably he thinks that my smile in the school is a put-on.   I e

“You are a philosopher, Dr Johnson,” said Oliver Edwards.   “I have tried too in my time to be a philosopher; but, I don’t know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in.” Philosophers are grim creatures.   Imagine Immanuel Kant with a smile on his lips.   It would be easier to visualise Jesus cracking an adult joke about King David’s sexcapade with Bathsheba.   From Descartes to Wittgenstein, the whole lot of them were damn serious about strangling the conceited bourgeois spirit of their time.   And they all failed, each one of them, inevitably.   Because the triumph of humanity is the triumph of the middle class pretensions and hypocrisy. There are no more philosophers left in the world.   The hypocrisy of the middle class has killed the philosophers.   Nietzsche would have said that the philosophers died laughing, laughing at the caricatures that walked about wearing expensive branded suits and smelling of cheap morality sold from all sorts of pulpits. Oliver Edwa