Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Failure and I are twins.   We have coexisted happily for years now.   It wasn’t fun in the beginning.   The problem was that I never liked to fail.   So in those early years I did what one of the idioms in my mother tongue, Malayalam, describes as ‘roll where you fall’ meaning make your fall appear as not a fall but a roll that you chose.   However, eventually that becomes quite boring.   Moreover, the onlookers will understand your trick sooner than later.   One of the fundamental and irrevocable truths of life is that people love losers.   Losers make people feel comfortable with themselves.   Another such truth is that it is easy to fail than succeed.   Ask the bulb man Edison who reportedly counted 10,000 failures on the way to illuminating the world with his bulb.   That was a neat number: 10,000.   Lucky man Edison was to get such a neat number of failures unless he was being metaphorical.   I find James Dyson a greater consolation.   He gives us a more convincing

We live in a time when those who point out the crimes become criminals while those who perpetrate the crimes become heroes.   The digital assaults on vice president Hamid Ansari are recent examples.   Does the vice president deserve the assaults? It was a long interview that vice president Ansari gave to Karan Thapar on Rajya Sabha TV.   Some so-called nationalists have focused their attention on a fraction of what the VP said: “… there is a feeling of unease, a sense of insecurity creeping in.”   He said that in answer to Karan Thapar’s question whether Indian Muslims are feeling insecure in the present India. Credit: PTI Why should such a large number of people take exception to Ansari’s answer?   Isn’t it plain truth that there are many communities of people, not just Muslims but also the Dalits and many others, who are feeling terribly insecure in present India?   Religious minorities have ample reasons to feel insecure as they are attacked in various devious w

I’m taking unusually long time with Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness .   The novel has failed to enchant me.   I feel it’s written with certain political motives.   Or else, the author has not been able to transmute her political leanings into art.   I may be wrong because I have just finished over a hundred pages only and there are nearly three times that many pages to be read. There is in the novel a lot of what the Romantic Wordsworth described as “spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions.”   But the poet had also demanded “recollection in tranquillity.”   T S Eliot later described literary writing as an escape from emotions.   The artist is a catalyst who transmutes the feelings and emotions into an aesthetic combination.   Art transcends the artist, in other words.   The artist’s personal biases should not taint the art.   Ms Roy failed in that part, it looks like.   Let’s take a passage from the novel for an example: … the news from Gujarat was