Tomichan Matheikal's blog

I don’t know if Shashi Tharoor abetted Sunanda Pushkar’s suicide. I don’t know whether it was suicide or natural death. I know one thing, however: India today is a country where anyone can become a criminal overnight and anyone can become a saint overnight depending on which political party you belong to or get support from. We have a Prime Minister whose complicity in the 2002 Gujarat riots is not a secret at all. You can kill hundreds of people, drive out thousands from their homes and sow the seeds of communal hatred in the whole country and still be a hero in India. The most powerful person in the country after the PM, Amit Shah, was notorious as an encounter killer until he put on a saintly halo round his fat face after his best friend became the most powerful man in the country. Yogi Adityanath just wrote off all the criminal cases against him when he became the Chief Minister of the most crime-ridden state in the country. 20,000 cases against politicians in Uttar Prade

Image from World Future Fund Technology is offering us more and more means of coming closer. There are chat sites, friendship sites, messaging apps; moreover, phone calls have become cheaper than ever. Has the distance between persons decreased, however? On the contrary, it seems to be increasing. The reasons for this are complex like in any social problem. I would like to draw your attention to one aspect of that complexity: increasing totalitarianism in government. Through a lot of means like the Aadhar, the government has taken over a tentacle-like grip on citizens. Do you know that every single bank account of yours is open to government surveillance? The government can, if it wants, monitor your internet usage, your phone calls, and even your personal life if it comes to that. On top of that intrusion into our personal affairs, the government is feeding us with a lot of lies and distortions. Already the textbooks in many North Indian states have been modified to t

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