Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Whenever the King wanted to excrete his devotees would compete with one another to carry the chamber pot. It was very rarely that they got an opportunity to carry the excreta of the King since the King was mostly abroad spreading the cultural greatness of their country far and wide. Whenever the King returned from abroad the devotees gathered outside the airport to receive him. They jostled with one another and elbowed out one another. Those who managed to get near to the King in spite of the Z+ guards (by bribing them, in fact) all had a chamber pot with them. “Do you want to excrete, Your Majesty?” They asked the King. “Please excrete, Your Majesty.” TV channels were ready with OB vans that had helicams which would record the King’s excreting. They telecasted the whole process under various names such as Bowel ki Bath and Swachh Rashtra. The finest industrialists of the country competed with one another to sponsor the TV shows. The leading banks financed the national enter

Book Review Title: Dera Sacha Sauda and Gurmeet Ram Rahim Author: Anurag Tripathi Publisher: Penguin Books, 2018 Pages: 198        Price: ₹299 When criminals are attributed godly stature, depravity spreads among people like a malady. Gurmeet Ram Rahim is one of the many godmen who attained godhood in India with the help of politicians, businessmen, goons and sub-mediocre common people. Anurag Tripathi’s book shows us how depraved a man Gurmeet was though he extracted worship from millions of devotees among whom were also powerful politicians and wealthy capitalists. “Gurmeet’s philosophy was far from spiritual,” says the book. “It was oriented from the beginning towards acquisition and accumulation of power.” When Gurmeet became the head in 1990, the Dera owned some five acres of land. By 2017 his empire in Sirsa alone extended to over 700 acres of land excluding the many benami properties belonging to the Dera. The book explains in detail the various strate

Some time back Maggie (my wife) asked me whether I had any regrets about my life hitherto. “A lot of things were wrong,” I said. “Some mistakes were due to my own nature and quite many more were because I didn’t know how to deal with other people and the games they played.” “So if you are given another life, you’d live it quite differently?”   She persisted. “Of course. But that doesn’t mean I’d toe the lines drawn by others. It just means that I’d make new mistakes.” I paused and then continued, “At least they’d be my own mistakes. They are preferable to other people’s truths.” We can’t go back and correct the mistakes of the past. When I find the dominant political party in the country trying to correct the mistakes or perceived mistakes in the country’s history, I get hiccups.   We can only act in the present. We can only move forward. The past offers us lessons. The mistakes of the past can teach us tremendous lessons, but they cannot be corrected. We shape our f

Image from Wikipedia When you are confronted with a situation that is irredeemably hopeless, what do you do? I would choose to avoid it and walk on. In the less sophisticated parlance of the village that I have chosen to live in now, if you step on shit you will stink. Three months before Mr Narendra Modi became the Prime Minister of India, I made a prediction in my blog: “Modi will engender a civil war in the country if he becomes its Prime Minister, my instincts predict.” Within months of his becoming PM, many Christian places of worship were attacked in Delhi and peripheral regions. Eventually Muslims and Hindu Dalits became the targets of hydra-headed attacks. People were killed in the name of cows and other totems.   Women were assaulted, raped and killed. The tragedy goes on. Most of the promises made in Modi’s election manifesto have remained unfulfilled though the country is marching towards the next general elections. Development, job creation, corruption-fre

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novella, Memories of My Melancholy Whores , is about an old man who wishes to gift himself “a night of wild love” with an adolescent virgin on his 90 th birthday. The nameless narrator never found time to marry because whores kept him too busy all his life. He never loved anyone, in fact. “Sex is the consolation one has for not finding enough love,” he says. He is a mediocre writer until his perverse desire on his 90 th birthday changes him radically. The madam of a brothel offers him a 14 year-old girl who is a virgin. Poverty leads her into this venture. She has been drugged by the madam because she is terribly scared of what may happen to her. One of her friends died of bleeding after having sex with a man from Gayra with whom she had run away. The “men from Gayra are famous for making she-mules sing,” says the madam. The narrator’s sexual prowess is well-known to the madam. The narrator sees the girl sleeping under the effect of the valerian

Caution : This is a personal post mandated as the finale of the A2ZChallenge by Blogchatter . April was a hectic month. The A2ZChallenge from Blogchatter demanded a blog post every day of the month leaving out the 4 Sundays. It wasn’t easy to cope with the demand since my duty as an examiner got me driving from home at 7 in the morning only to return at 6 in the evening in the first two weeks of April. A tragedy in the family kept me in the doldrums in the latter half of the month. In spite of all that, I managed to meet the challenge with a religious dedication. I just didn’t want to give up for this once at least. I acknowledge my gratitude to Blogchatter for giving me the challenge as well as publicity for my blog. I thank the team in anticipation for their help in bringing out my 26 A to Z posts as an e-book titled Life’s Magic . There are a few individuals – whose comments came personally via WhatsApp – who sustained me in spite of the temptations to capitulat

From Reader's Digest Universal Dictionary p.1701 Weltanschauung is a German word for one’s personal philosophy or worldview. We all have our own Weltanschauung though we may not be conscious of it. Our actions are guided by our Weltanschauung. If we see the world as a hostile place, we will keep a safe distance from it or deal with it warily. The Weltanschauung of Mahatma Gandhi or Mother Teresa was moulded by compassion while that of Jawaharlal Nehru and Bertrand Russell was founded on reason and logic. While our genes play a major role in shaping our Weltanschauung, the environment in which we grew up and the people who nurtured us in our childhood are responsible for our Weltanschauung to a great extent. My Weltanschauung would have been quite different from what it is, had I been brought up in a different environment and taught by different people. Having said that, I must hasten to add that as I grew up into adulthood I changed much of what my parents and teachers