Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Book Review Title: Vanishing Acts Author: Jodi Picoult ISBN: 978-0-340-83549-4 Memory is a very unreliable thing.   Most of us keep on recreating our memories to make ourselves feel comfortable and the illusions created in the process of those modifications are necessary to make life bearable.   In the words of Jodi Picoult, “… after a while, you believe the fiction you’ve told yourself so well that you cannot remember the fact upon which it was based.” Vanishing Acts is about the role of memories in human life.   Andrew Hopkins is arrested at the age of 60 for kidnapping his own daughter 28 years ago.   Delia was just 4 then and her name was Bethany Matthews.   Andrew changed his name as well as his daughter’s as he took her to another place in order to avoid being caught.   He was divorced from his wife and she was given custody of their daughter.   Andrew was allowed to visit her and what he saw during one of those visits forced him to kidnap her.   Delia was j

To be a poet is to suffer deeply.   The better a poet you are, the greater your inner agonies.   Aami surveys the inner turmoil that bilingual poet Kamala Das (Madhavikutty in Malayalam) went through for most part of her life.   Married at the age of 15 to man 20 years her senior, Kamala (Aami as she is called at home) did not receive the kind of affection she longed for from her husband.   As narrated in Kamala’s autobiography, My Story , her husband ‘raped’ her in the night of their marriage.   Kamala would have loved to get some affectionate fondling from him, at least to have him caress her face after that love-making, a touch on her belly, some expression of affection, instead of being treated like an object of sexual pleasure. The longing for affection can create acute inner pains, especially when it is denied to a poet with intense passions.   Kamala said in her autobiography that she found an alternative in a man who made love to her passionately.   In the movie t

I developed a nagging backache which forced me to visit a doc.   The doc didn’t even bother to ask me any detail.   As soon as I said backache, he wrote the prescription.   I bought all those medicines simply because in this village where I live the hospital trusts you till the end.   Which means you can’t leave without paying the bill though they won’t ask for any payment until you leave. The medicines remain untouched but the pain vanished. Miracle I came home and checked the names of the medicines online.   Antibiotics and antacids and painkillers.   (And a bill of ₹449).   Any medical shop would have given me better ideas.   I didn’t take any of those medicines in spite of Maggie’s scolding.   I challenged the pain with carrying water for my garden.   I challenged the pain without singing alleluia to them.   No Praise the Lord.   No ear-splitting hymns.   Just a challenge to myself.   Three days. The pain disappeared.   The medicines still remain on my side table i

I love pakodas.   My tryst with pakodas began when I joined the erstwhile Sawan Public School, Delhi (RIP) as a teacher nearly two decades back.   Most important staff meetings ended with delicious pakodas prepared by the resident cooks of the school. Onion pakodas, chilly pakodas, cauliflower pakodas, paneer pakodas… Oh boy, were they delicious! Sawan was shut down in 2015 by Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) which razed the entire lot of structures – the school, hostels, staff quarters and hospital – to the ground in order to make parking space for the Baba’s affluent devotees (for the aam devotees, there was ample parking space at a little distance from the ashram).   I migrated to Kerala, to my native place, and missed Sawan’s pakodas along with quite a few other things. Image from The Wire One day, as I was returning home from the school where I work now, I saw a man selling pakodas on the roadside.   Nostalgia is a dominant sensation in me, like in many romantical

“You are the master of vanishing acts,” Kartik told the magician. “Make me vanish.” The magician smiled.   “What do you mean by make you vanish?” “I want to disappear from the world. I’m sick of the world.” “I can’t do that.” “You make even a train vanish. You made the Taj Mahal vanish once. Why can’t you then make a small creature like me vanish?” “Magic is just illusions, young man,” the magician continued with his unfading smile which had a magical charm.   “The train doesn’t vanish actually.   Nor does the Taj.” “Then?” “I merely divert the viewer’s attention to something else.” Kartik looked at the magician incredulously. “Have you ever seen a circus?” Magician asked. Kartik nodded his head. “Yes.” “Have you watched the trapeze artistes?” Kartik nodded again. “Sometimes the artiste on a trapeze vanishes temporarily from the attention of the audience.   The audience is sitting mesmerised by the artistes jumping from trapeze t

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