Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Picture from LatinTimes ‘You’re so powerless, Pilate,’ Jesus thought as he stood in the praetorium.   The prefect of Caesar had washed his hands off his responsibility to uphold the truth.   ‘What is truth?’ he had asked. He did not wait for an answer.   Jesus was not going to answer him anyway.   He knew as well as Pilate that definitions were not what mattered to either of them.   ‘I am the truth,’ Jesus had said many times.   ‘You are the truth,’ he would have told Pilate, ‘if you wish to be.’   ‘Crucify him! Crucify him!’ The crowd outside the praetorium clamours louder and louder.   Being very religious, they have not entered the praetorium.   The praetorium is a pagan place and Yahweh’s chosen people should not enter pagan places on the Passover day lest they be defiled. The High Priests, Annas and Caiaphas, instigated the people by wielding their religious power.   Jesus had set the axe at the very root of their religion.   Their religion meant rubrics a

I realise that driving has lost its charm for me.   The last few days have me driving for over an hour from seven in the morning in order to reach the place where I have been assigned a job related to my regular work.   I reach back home at 6 in the evening driving the same route back.   There was a time when bike riding was a passion for me.   I loved to glide along the mountain tracks of Meghalaya just for the fun of it.   When I shifted to Delhi, riding ceased to be fun.   Delhi roads make people mad.   There are too many vehicles on the roads and all of them are in a hurry.   Many of them are plain crazy too.   I never enjoyed the rides in that crazy city of insane drivers and riders though I never became the target of any road rage which was ubiquitous on Delhi’s teeming roads.   I thought a car drive through the roads in Kerala flanked by lush greenery would be fun.   No way, as I learnt now.   You can never afford to look away from the windshield.   You don’t know

Image from Pinterest Like all adolescents, I too loved to stand in front of the mirror and admire myself.   As an adolescent, I thought I was the most handsome boy in the world.   Like most people, I outgrew that phase.   Mirror has now become redundant in my life.   Well, almost.   I still need it for trimming my grey beard. Selfies belong to adolescence, I think.   It is natural for adolescents to think that they are the centre of the universe, that everyone in the world is watching them and admiring them.   When adolescents put up their selfies in social media, there is nothing unnatural.   If people like me, whose autumn leaves have started dropping, are obsessed with selfies, then there is a problem.   I can’t even use my mobile phone to take a selfie properly. My hand will tremble and the phone will fall off most probably.   Even if it didn’t, I wouldn’t dare to take selfies.   I know that I am not the centre of the universe. I admire selfies sometimes.   But

No, I don’t want to walk with you, I’m sorry, I want to walk with the cloud up there, the dark, looming, vaporous mass. I can smile at you, laugh at your jokes, help you with the work, but that’s quite all. I want to walk with the cloud up there and become shapeless and massless and melt into a great sorrow that descends to dissolve into the dirt that I’ve smiled at and laughed at and helped create.

Some phone calls are ominous.   There was a time when I used to dread them.   Mercifully they are very rare.   They come from someone or the other associated with an institution of which I was a member for ten years of my youth.   Though I bid final adieu to the institution somewhere down the line, the institution took a diabolic interest in haunting me throughout my life and making as much a mess of it as it could.   Image from ArtStation When the call came today, I ignored it as I often do with unknown numbers. But when the call was repeated a few hours later, I answered it.   As soon as I heard the connections mentioned by the caller, I knew I was doomed.   It meant that they are going to mess up my life now that I have brought some order to it after I dealt with a protracted depression and the concomitant downsides of it. A couple of days back, ‘destiny’ cropped up in a discussion in a class I was taking. I told my students that I never believed in ‘destiny’ as a y

Is Arvind Kejriwal a symbol of the increasing effeteness of truth?   He has been issuing apology after apology, the latest being to Nitin Gadkari.   Earlier he apologised to Bikram Singh Majithia.   Along with Manish Sisodia, he apologised to Kapil Sibal’s son Amit Sibal.   The offended are accepting the apologies with surprising promptness.   There are 30 more defamation cases against Kejriwal.   So are we going to get 30 more apologies and 30 more prompt acceptances? It is understandable that Mr Kejriwal does not wish to waste his time on court cases.   He says he wants to devote his time to more fruitful administrative activities.   That’s fine.   The people need those services and not court entertainments.   But the promptness with which the offended people accept the apologies raise our suspicions.   Is truth being buried facilely with each apology?   Do the apologies and their prompt acceptances mean that it is not easy to defend the truth in today’s India?   I

Hi Friend, “April is the cruellest month,” T. S. Eliot declared, “breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land…”   April is my summer break.   I’m going to celebrate it with a lot of writing, “stirring (certain) dull roots with spring rain.”   Daily blogging is one of those challenges.   ‘One of’ implies that I have taken up another challenge too.   That will be revealed towards the end of April.   This is to comply with Blogchatter: reveal the theme of my AtoZ posts.   I wrote a few days back that “My A2Z may begin with Abracadabra and end on a magical Zenith.”   Yes, the theme of my AtoZ posts is: Life’s Magic . It can be read as: 1.      Life is Magic 2.      Life has Magic 3.      The Magic of Life The first post will indeed be titled Abracadabra and the last Zenith .   Abracadabra starts off the magic.   I hope to take you to the Zenith of a magic mountain by the time we reach the end of April.   I’m not the wizard, however.   You will be the wizard with