Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Ivan Karamazov of Dostoevsky’s novel, The Karamazov Brothers , is a highly tortured character because he cannot accept the given reality.   “I don’t accept this world of God’s,” he tells his brother Alyosha who is a highly spiritual person.   “It’s not that I don’t accept God, you must understand, it’s the world created by Him I don’t accept and cannot accept.” How can an omniscient and omnipotent God create a world with so much evil?   Ivan’s intellect cannot find a satisfactory answer to that problem.   Ivan wants a world of goodness.   If human beings make use of their rational faculty properly, the world can be a place of goodness.   Ivan is an intellectual who would love to see a coldly moral world, a world in which people’s actions are based on reason.   Ivan’s father himself is a wicked man who lives by his passions.   His step-brother, Smerdyakov, becomes a murderer because of Ivan’s cold philosophy.   Ivan is shocked beyond endurance by the murder of his own fathe

A WhatsApp message beeped a few minutes back as I logged on to the Net. Write something in the blog; don't disappoint your readers , said the message with a couple of emoticons.   The message was from a student of mine. Yesterday my school officially bid farewell to the class 12 students. One of the students mentioned that I helped her discover the poet in her and also that she was a regular reader of my blog.   Namrin, that student, is an amazing poet. I’m happy to present her blog here .   A class 12 student who can write lines such as: I was the one you were afraid to have and lose. Twisted, so is fate. I want to own this record, I want myself. is not just an ordinary student.   Students like her are a blessing to a teacher like me.   They keep me young. The other day a colleague of mine remarked that I belonged to New Gen though I was the oldest in the staffroom.   I said, “When I was about 20 years, I stopped growing.”   One of the reasons why I lov

I uninstalled from my phone the UMANG app which “allows you to access Indian Government services online through web and mobile (phone)”.   It was installed because I received a message that hereafter all notifications regarding my EPF would be sent only via this app.   But when I saw that the app was demanding too much from me, like access to my contact list, to the picture gallery in my phone, to my email contact list, to the files on my phone and so on, I put my foot down and said No.   I don’t trust my government so much, I’m sorry. Source: Here There are quite a few other apps that I use which also demand a few permissions which I have given.   But I’m willing to trust those service providers – willy-nilly, though – more than my government.   For example, I trust my bank whose app also demands quite a few peeps into my private affairs.   I trust Google which actually peeps too much.   Why don’t I trust my government? My government has never given me satisfactory se

“Happy Valentine’s Day, darling,” Socrates came home earlier than usual to greet his wife on love’s own day. Xanthippe frowned.   “What’s wrong with you?   First of all, you come home leaving your real Valentines behind, your beloved disciples, I mean, and then you forget that we’re now living in Hindu-satan where Valentine is a phoren demon.” “What’s in a name?” Socrates asked.   “Hindu-satan is just a counterpart of Paki-satan, names, just names.   My Plato will tell you that names are illusions thrice removed from the essence.” “Plato is your real Valentine, isn’t he?” Xanthippe threw a sidelong glance at her husband. “Plato was amused when they said that Valentine was a corruption of Valmiki,” Socrates said ignoring his wife’s insinuation about his relationship with Plato. What does she know about Platonic love? “Valmiki?” Xanthippe’s eyebrows rose to form two mighty arches on her broad forehead where the greying hairline had begun to recede. Source: M

Great Hornbill [Image courtesy here ] The Great Hornbill is the state bird of Kerala.   It is called vezhambal [ വേഴാമ്പൽ ] in Malayalam.   Vezhambal appeared copiously in Malayalam literature though the present generation’s aversion to nature and its wealth has alienated the bird from literature too.   In Malayalam literary tradition, Vezhambal cannot drink water directly; it has to wait for the rains.   So vezhambal is a bird of longing in Malayalam literature. The vezhambal longs for the rain.   People long for love. When vezhambal roamed freely in the Malayalam literary landscape, love was a forbidden fruit in the Eden of Kerala.   Youngsters were supposed to marry the partners discovered by parents in what was (and still is, to a large extent) known as ‘arranged marriages’.   ‘Love marriage’ was considered an abominable aberration. I grew up in the 60s and early 70s listening to the plaintive love songs written by Vayalar Ramavarma and composed by Devarajan, argua

I have always been attracted to broken things.   Not that I could ever mend them.   I am poor at that sort of jobs.   In fact, I’m bad at anything practical.   I can read books and at best teach them to impressionable young people.   Nothing more.   If there is a leaking tap at home, I have to depend on a plumber.   I won’t even be able to replace a punctured tyre of my car without somebody’s assistance. But broken things enchant me. When I was 18 years old a classmate of mine quoted the catchphrase of Fevikwik in a speech: “Fixes everything except broken hearts.” I was stuck to that phrase for years.   [I think it was Fevikwik, I’m not sure.] People came and went in my life breaking hearts. Not mine; I have no heart, they say.   They broke the hearts of each other.   I saw people sitting by the shore of a weeping river and gathering the fragments of their broken hearts.   I saw them piecing the fragments together.   I broke somebody’s heart recently.   With just a sta

The great writer Franz Kafka contributed the word Kafkaesque to English.   The worlds in Kafka’s novels are a veritable nightmare which is a metaphorical extension of our real life.   I suggest a new word to English: Modiesque.   My definition will be: “adjective: characteristic of a system that is at once oppressive and supportive, oppressive to the majority and supportive to a chosen group of people, and in which the majority of the oppressed perceive themselves as beneficiaries because of false propaganda.   Synonym: post-truth.” Renuka Chowdhury of Congress who dared to laugh at Modiesque India is an intelligent woman.   Like most intelligent Indians today, she is helpless in dealing with the Modiesque India.   So she chose to laugh.   Any intelligent Indian would love to laugh.   I think I am also intelligent though not as much as Arnab Gau-swami.   Renuka can afford to laugh because the Indians like me pay her salaries and perks.   Gau-swami can laugh - though he cho