Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Painting by Adolph Hiremy Hirschl I grew up listening to a lot of stories about the imminent end of the world.  Jesus spoke pretty much about it and we listened to those biblical verses in the church often enough.  The romantic dreamer in Jesus conjured up a vivid image of “the Son of Man” coming in his glory on the final judgment day, escorted by all the angels.  In that glorious vision, God is a King ensconced on a glittering throne.  The entire mankind will assemble before him.  No one is given a choice, of course.  The King will weigh the virtues and sins of each person and accordingly assign heaven or hell. It was my childish fancy that the gala event would come soon and I would escape from the misery of life on the earth.  I don’t remember whether I gloated about sitting in heaven and smirking at all the sinners burning in hell.  As I grew up I realised that Jesus had imagined all those things long ago and nothing happened in all those 2000 years.  In my own little

It is with a heavy heart that I deleted the number from the contact list.  My Samsung phone cautioned me: Do you want to delete the number or remove it from the favourites?   And it gave me three options: Cancel / Remove / Delete .  When you have chosen a path after enough deliberation, there should be no hesitation.  I hit the delete option. Last Christmas my phone showed a number of missed calls from a particular number.  Both Maggie and I were outside home and we didn’t hear the call.  I am usually reluctant to answer calls from unrecognised numbers and I never make a return call to such numbers.  Finally Maggie answered the call from that particular number when I was still outside.  It was a call from a person whose number I had deleted from my contact list as well as memory some 15 years ago.  He said he wanted to shed a burden from his heart this Christmas day.  He said he had wanted to do it during many other previous Christmases but had no courage.  He also asked Magg

Fiction “Veg or non-veg?” the waiter asked.  I was travelling on Rajdhani Express which served too much of inedible food throughout the journey after which the waiters would stand at the doors of the compartment demanding what they called ‘tips’ without paying which you had no way out although you had paid a hefty sum for your journey.  Those were the days before the achche din . Those were days when the travellers could choose their food without fear irrespective of what the guy on the next seat liked. “Non-veg,” I said to the waiter because I was bored of the stale paneer they had served during lunch.  “ Tu maans khate ho ?” asked the guy who sat next to me. “I found the veg lunch boring,” I said. “Boring?” he looked menacing.  “It’s the healthiest food.” “I know,” I said. “But what they served was stale.  I’m hoping for something fresh, you know.” “Vegetarians are compassionate people,” he said. “I doubt,” I said hesitantly.  “Why?” “You se

Mediocrity is a big bore.  What can be interesting about people fighting for power, money and manipulations?  I never took interest in politics for a large part of my youth and my well-wishers said it was because I was too full of myself.  They were not entirely wrong, I agree.  I was an egomaniac to a great extent.  But I was interesting enough to entertain my well-wishers.  Otherwise they wouldn’t have taken me as seriously as they did. Eventually I began to take interest in politics.  I was forced to.  The massacre of the Sikhs that followed Indira Gandhi’s assassination jolted me, but I rationalised it as a reaction, disproportionate though, to the brutal killing of a prime minister by her own security guards.  When Graham Staines was burnt in his wagon along with his two sons aged 10 and 6, I was hurt too deeply to write about it.  The gruesome act was perpetrated by Bajrang Dal fundamentalists who claimed that Staines was converting Hindus into Christians.  I have alway

Fable The balcony belonged to the pigeon couple.  From the time we moved into the apartment they were there.  It was their home before the apartment became ours.  We didn’t disturb them except for putting up the cooler against the window.  Then they made the cooler top their home. They built their nest there and the female of the pair laid eggs which hatched in the due course of time.  The nestlings grew wings and flew away when their time came.  The cycle continued.  Years passed.  Many more eggs were laid and many more nestlings grew wings.  We cleaned up the cooler top each time the nestlings flew away. One day I was standing on the balcony when the mother started pushing a nestling out of the nest.  That was not a new sight for me.  It happens occasionally.  The first flight has to be forced sometimes.  The nestling cried.  “Ma, please, don’t,” It said. “You have to go, my dear.  You have to move on,” said the mother. There was one more nestling sitting in t

The world’s two largest religions by population grew large and mighty under persecution.  Both Christianity and Islam suffered much persecution in their toddler years.  Religion has a peculiar ability to convert torture into a virtue for the believer.  That’s why persecution is not the way to eliminate any religion.  Just the opposite. That’s why BJP and its allies are making a terrible mistake in India.  They are persecuting the minority communities in a variety of rather unimaginative ways like cow protection and women protection (anti-love jihad).  Neither the cows nor the women are protected and that’s not the purpose either.  The goal is to victimise certain communities of people in the name of cows and women. The ultimate goal is Hindu Rashtra. Is the strategy good, however?  History shows it is not.  The Right wing in India should invent more imaginative and effective methods for achieving their objective.  During a free period today at school, I was reading a

My life was a series of mistakes.  If I am given another chance, I’ll do the whole thing differently.  But does that promise a life without mistakes?  “It’s only those who do nothing that make no mistakes,” as Joseph Conrad wrote.  So if I am given another chance, I’ll make mistakes different from the ones I made in this life. But I know this is the only chance.  And that’s enough too.  Perhaps the only purpose of life is to teach us certain lessons.  I am not among people who believe that life has any great purpose or meaning.  The philosophy that appealed most to me is absurdism which states that human beings exist in a purposeless, chaotic universe.  We discover meanings.  Rather we forge them for our consolation, in order to make life bearable.  We create patterns in the Brownian motion that goes on endlessly and chaotically all around us all the time.  Religions, philosophies, art, music and a whole lot of other things help us create meanings. I created quite a lot