Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Image Courtesy here Though Pranab Mukherjee not-so-subtly denounced the basic tenets of RSS in his speech at the RSS training camp today, his description of the RSS founder Hedgewar as a “great son of Mother India” betrays the ambivalence of the former President’s attitude to the fundamentalist organisation. Is he suffering from senility? Probably yes. Or he may be playing a wily political game at which he was always an expert.    Is Hedgewar great in any way? He founded an organisation on the principle of hatred. Hatred cannot make anyone a “great son of Mother India” unless you subscribe to the right wing policies that have come to dominate Indian politics from 2014.    Hedgewar hated Muslims. That hatred was and still is the raison d'être of RSS. Hedgewar hated Indian National Congress simply because it stood for secular inclusiveness. His hatred of the Congress and what it stood for made him and his organisation a tacit supporter of the British Raj.    When

From Indian Express There is no way to rule innocent people, as Ayn Rand said. How do you put any sort of control on innocent people? And ruling is all about putting controls, isn’t it?   “The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals,” said Rand. If there aren’t enough criminals, the government will make them. You declare more and more things as illegal and then it becomes impossible for people to live without breaking laws.    From the time the Modi government came to power in 2014 an endless list of laws has been implemented. A facile taxing system called GST, Real Estate Regulation Act, laws for recovery of debt, insolvency and bankruptcy, linking almost everything under the sun with Aadhar… It’s a formidable list. Then there are the unwritten rules implemented by all sorts of volunteers like the various Senas: what food you can eat and cannot eat, what dress you may wear, who you can marry, which god you can worship, in which language you s

Book Review Every person has a story to tell: his/her own. Life is a tale full of sound and fury, as Shakespeare’s Macbeth realised to his sad dismay. How the tale is told makes the difference. Roma Gupta Sinha narrates the story of her life in Destiny’s Favourite Child , whose subtitle ‘An Autobiography of a Rebel’ is what actually drew me to the book. The book is published by The Blogchatter (a community of bloggers) as part of its E-book Carnival . It became obligatory for me to review this book by virtue of the terms and conditions for the authors who participate in the Carnival.    Roma has, no doubt, an engaging story to tell. There is a childhood that struggled with a profusion of cousins in a joint family in which the author’s parents were absent. There was the disquieting stand-offishness between the parents. There is the eventual loss of mother and alienation from father. And so on.    Trauma makes autobiographies fascinating stories but only when certain dep

Book Review Sitharaam Jayakumar is a good story teller. His e-book, Eighty Hours to Save Karen , kept me hooked so much so that I read it in one go this morning. It is the story of Air Commodore Mathew Williams’ single-minded efforts to save his granddaughter Karen Lakshmi who has been afflicted with a mysterious illness. Karen is the last member of the family left to him.    The mystery revolves round the few people who lived in Mathew’s house before he bought it in an auction. All those people perished too in rather tragic circumstances some of which were their own making. Their gardener survives to tell their tale. And the gardener has one trick too many up his sleeve.    Mathew lives in Kimnur, a remote village in Himachal Pradesh and the story revolves round his house there though he has to drive to Shimla and fly to Mumbai within the eponymous 80 hours in order to connect the necessary threads in the plot. Finally all the loose ends are brought together to take t

Book Review Going back to the historical roots of mythological places can be a fascinating exercise for lovers of both mythology and history. Sayan Bhattacharya has done an eminent job in his e-book, Ancient Cities of India , bringing us both the history and mythology of some of the prominent cities mentioned in our great epics.    The book begins with the disclaimer that it is not “a wholly authenticated version of mythology and history as it is merely a compilation of information from various sources and re-telling of historical events…” It is not possible for anyone to provide “wholly authenticated” history of the places that existed a few thousand years ago. One has to work with whatever archaeological evidences available and historical references made by later travellers and writers.    Bhattacharya brings alive the ancient cities as they existed during the times of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. He narrates how the names of many of these cities underwent evolu

Profound truths are often as simple as Einstein’s famous formula, E=mc 2 or Benjamin Disraeli’s aphorism, “Youth is a blunder; manhood a struggle; old age regret.” Beneath the apparent simplicity lies immense profundity. That every mass is a terrific bundle of energy is at once simple and profound. The growth from youth’s blunders to the regrets of old age is also simple and profound.    Most people refuse to understand the simplicity as well as profundity of truths that matter. They like to add colours and flavours to truths in order to make them more bearable or more attractive (apparently) or to wield them as weapons for self-aggrandisement. Then we get all sorts of religions and creeds and isms. And the concomitant struggles and strife.    “The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts,” said Alfred North Whitehead. “We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding m

Lesson No. 1 from Karnataka: There’s no ethics in politics , stupid is the title of Chetan Bhagat’s article in today’s Times of India , a newspaper that has sold itself to Bhagat’s beloved political party. I am among those whom he has labelled as “stupid” but I refuse to accept the label. Here is the reason.    Bhagat’s only argument in the verbose article is that in “desperate times” political parties can resort to unethical practices in order to win. Winning is more important than ethics. The end justifies the means, in other words, and that is a somersault from what the Father of the Nation had taught us. We have indeed come a long way, too long a way, from the Mahatma and his ideals.    What is ironical is that the party which created the “desperate times” is indulging in practices which Bhagat (or Bhakt, as many people have begun to call him) has adjudged as unethical. Leaving aside ethics for a moment, plain logic will tell us that the party which has created the