Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Having just finished reading M T Vasudevan Nair’s Malayalam novel, രണ്ടാമൂഴം [ The Second Turn ], I wonder whether the award-winning novel would have been written today.  It was written in 1984 and went on to receive more than 50 reprints in Malayalam, let alone the translations.  The fate of movies like Padmavati makes me think that the novel would have attracted much controversy had it been published today. However, the novel is being made into a movie, the most expensive non-English movie with a budget of $155 million [INR 1000 crore].  Maybe India will be a different country by 2021, the year in which the movie will be completed, and the movie won’t court undue controversy.  The novel takes quite an unorthodox look at the Mahabharata. Bhima is the narrator and in his perspective no character is divine or even unduly superhuman.  Even Krishna appears as just another warrior and king of a small kingdom.  Bhishma gets hardly any importance since Bhima had little to do wit

Fiction “I can get you arrested for attempting to bribe a government officer,” Alex said imperiously to the man sitting in front of him. The man had come to get his contribution to the Labourers’ Welfare Fund assessed.  “One percent of the total cost of construction is the legal amount,” Alex had told him.  “I have assessed the cost of the construction of your house as ₹70 lakh.  So you have to contribute ₹70,000 to the Labourers’ Welfare Fund.” The man pleaded with Alex to reduce the cost of construction to ₹40 lakh.  “₹10,000 will be yours,” the man said sotto voce.  After threatening the man with imprisonment, Alex threw a glance at Leela who sat at the next table.  Leela was Alex’s colleague.  “Isn’t she impressed with my honesty?”  Leela pretended not to have heard anything and carried on with her work. It didn’t matter, of course.  His honesty was not meant to impress anyone.  He was an honest officer unlike other government officers.  He had an exemplary se

Historians are not sure whether Padmavati is a mere legend or a historical figure.  That doesn’t matter either.  Objective truth is not the concern of most people.  People want convenient truths.  People want truths that serve their practical purposes.  Most religious truths belong to that category.  Padmavati is also one such expedient truth.  What is that truth?  I am Rani Padmavati, the Queen of Chittor.  People call me the Queen of Beauty.  I have never understood why our men bother about beauty at all.  They are warriors and love fighting. Bravery, physical strength and honour are the values they really cherish and want all of us to possess.  We cherish beauty too.  But we’d prefer to keep beauty veiled behind the purdah.  If anyone other than the husband dares to raise the purdah, he will be killed.  Beauty is a private property among us.  We, the women, are our men’s private properties. That is how my story of Padmavati began, a story which I wrote when the cont

When children rush in where adults fear to tread, there is cause for concern.  Children are committing suicide for reasons as silly as being scolded by parents or teachers.  Children are committing crimes which adults would find repulsive.  Why is innocence fleeing from children? Germaine Greer described the library as “a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.”  The library is a treasure house of knowledge and information.  The library brings to you heroes and villains, notions and perversions, the saint and the sinner.  The library opens your inner eye and reveals the hidden secrets of the world.  While knowledge is a priceless treasure, it is also potential terror.  That is why the biblical God asked Adam and Eve not to eat the fruit of knowledge.  Today children are exposed to a tremendous lot of information which most of them are not able to handle effectively.  The mobile phone with internet connection, the social media and the television

Hogenakkal in Tamil Nadu bordering Karnataka is a place where rocks and water interplay to produce a unique symphony of nature.  Water keeps gushing from all around into a lake in which coracles (small round rafts) carrying tourists dance blissfully to the rhythms of the nature’s symphony.   I visited the place the other day with a group of students.  It was an awesome experience.  The rocks that tower all around you like a mammoth fortress look like a phenomenal sculpture.  Water has created its own unique artwork in those carbonatite rocks.  One can spend hours admiring the beauty of those rocks.  You can admire the waterfalls all around if you prefer.  The place is also described as the Niagara Falls of India because of the number of waterfalls that straddle the rocks.  I love water.  In fact, it’s quite a love affair that I share with water.  Water embraces you totally.  It engulfs you.  It swallows you.  But love affairs are private and I didn’t jump into the wate

There was a period in my life when I regarded myself as the personification of perfection.  When I grew out of it I realised that the pretension was a subconscious ploy to conceal the painful conflicts within.  It took years and a lot of people’s relentless jabs and prods for me to come to terms with the insecurity feelings that haunted my inner being like a bloodsucking vampire.  When I exorcised the vampire from my being, I found myself withdrawing from society altogether.  I realised with some horror how unfit I was in the society: incapable of understanding people’s underlying motives and meanings and hence incapable of dealing with them without hurting myself.  Solitude becomes a soothing balm when you learn to accept it as your co-traveller.  There’s a young friend, however, who draws out words from me occasionally.  During one of the long conversations I had with this friend, I asked, “What is there in common between you and me that holds us together?”  Pat came th

Image Courtesy imdb Hardik Patel’s personal life has been made ‘viral’ by certain holier-than-thou Indians.  If anything, it underscores the hypocrisy that accompanies the Indian mindset like a holy cow. India is a country that is governed by people with heinous criminal records.  We have no qualms about accepting as our heroes people who are worse swindlers than mafia dons.  Mass murderers are elevated to the stature of gods and temples are constructed for them.  But when it comes to sex, we have a quaint sense of morality. Even Nehru has been drawn into the controversy and parallel are drawn between that great personality and Hardik Patel who is yet to prove anything except rabble-rousing skills.  Some BJP leaders even went to the ridiculous extent of posting pictures of Nehru hugging his own sister to show that he was a sex maniac.  Nehru might have had extramarital affairs.  Extramarital affairs are not justifiable as they pose serious threats to family bonds and