Tomichan Matheikal's blog

  I take on the Baton of Blogchatter Ebook Carnival from Medha whose ebook ' The Last Seychelles Flame ' is also part of the mix. About Medha's ebook: Adrija has all the qualities for a boy to reject her marriage proposal, and so her parents are worried about finding a groom for her. She moves to Mumbai to become the best fashion photographer and Cupid strikes.. or not.. Will she unite with her true love?    I took up the Blogchatter E-book challenge for a few reasons chief among which was learning to meet deadlines when it comes to writing. I find it easy to meet deadlines where my profession (teaching) is concerned. While writing, on the other hand, I have been quite a dismal failure. There are two books that I have kept half-finished. Both of them are very important for me and yet I have not been able to find time for completing them. So I decided to give me this challenge: complete the A to Z posts, 26 of them in a month’s time. I succeeded. Of course, I kept

An old friend of mine underwent angioplasty recently and I decided to visit him today. I asked Maggie to join me since she knew him and more since I loved company for the hour-long drive. The friend is a Catholic priest who was a classmate of mine for 6 years in the seminary. Let me call him S.    Our conversation happened to graze religion and I mentioned that I was no church-goer. Maggie thought that the priest would find that scandalous. On the contrary, S asked, “What’s the use of going to church if that doesn’t make one a good person? I know a lot of people who attend church as a mere duty. If you are a good person doing good to others, it hardly matters whether you go to church or not.”    “He has his own spirituality. He meditates.” Maggie offered.    “What more do you want?” S asked. “God is not the private property of the church.”    Maggie was neither shocked nor scandalised. Living with me had made her familiar with similar, if not much more radical, vie

“There was a time when we used to carry something home from the theatre after watching a movie,” Maggie said as we were driving home having watched the Malayalam movie, Abrahaminte Santatikal (Abraham’s Offspring) . “Why are today’s movies so hollow?” She asked.    “Can a movie reflect anything other than its times?” I answered. “But this one was not entirely hollow,” I added.   “Is there anything you’ll remember tomorrow about this movie?”    “I don’t think so. But the plot was brilliant.”    The plot is what makes Abrahaminte Santatikal entertaining enough. The movie is just a thriller, a perfect drama. There is crime, fraud, deception, revenge: the usual ingredients of thrillers. But Abrahaminte Santatikal begins with a serial crime: nine murders committed by a religious fundamentalist. The way that murderer is caught before he commits his intended tenth murder is based on too tenuous a reason and it will fail to satisfy any intelligent viewer.    Soon t

Fiction “How do you create a story?” The English teacher asked in the class. After listening to the answers from various students he said, “Imagine a character, give him a problem, and voila there begins your story.”    The day’s lesson was John Updike’s story, Should Wizard Hit Mommy? In that story Jack tells a bedtime story to his daughter. It is a story about a skunk named Roger whose problem is his foul smell which drives away all his potential friends. “Children can be terribly insensitive sometimes,” the teacher said. “They are not as innocent as they are believed to be. Imagine our little hero being pooh-poohed by other children calling him Roger Stinky Skunk.”    Jenny was sceptical as usual. Children , he said. Weren’t they animals ? She didn’t like many things that her English teacher said in the class. She thought his views, quite many of them at least, were outlandish. He would say things like “Miracles are dying to be born in your minds; just change the w

“Treat me as it befits a king.”    Alexander was amused by the demand from a vanquished king. Porus stood before him as a prisoner but with all the solemnity of a king still playing on his anguished visage. They peered into each other’s eyes. Alexander could easily gauge the depths of Porus’ mind. Real kings understand other real kings. Only those who are slaves at heart will demean real kings.    Those other kings were not real kings. When he asked them to attend the meeting he had summoned in order to demand their allegiance to him and tokens of that allegiance, they came meekly. They were intimidated by his successes hitherto, the last being Gandhara. They were not kings at heart. They deserved what they got.    Here was the real king.    “How do you want to be treated?” Alexander had asked him with much amusement. Standing before him was a king who had refused to attend the meeting he had summoned. “Yes, I will meet you,” he had sent the message, “but as a king

Salman Rushdie once mentioned a seminar organised in London on Indo-Anglian literature. It was attended by leading Indian English writers. On the first day an eminent novelist from India began his speech with a Sanskrit shloka which he refused to translate saying that every educated Indian was expected to understand the shloka without translation. There were Indian writers present there belonging to Muslim, Parsi, Christian and Sikh backgrounds, people with hardly any knowledge of Sanskrit. In one fell swoop the speaker had made all those writers outcasts, people who did not belong in India.    That happened about three decades ago, much before Hindutva emerged as a dominant force in India. A few days back the Times of India reported that CBSE had decided to remove all languages except Hindi and Sanskrit from the list of options for Central Teacher Eligibility Test (CTET). The decision was revoked immediately because of strong protests from Tamil Nadu and the foresight of si

Book Review There are some writers whom you wish to meet or at least watch secretly from a little distance because you feel that they carry a lot of secrets, if not subdued pain, in their mellow hearts. Reema D’Souza comes across as one such writer in her book, Peiskos . In the brief preface to the little book, the author says that the 26 pieces in this book are stories woven round remembered “titbits of life”. The pieces read more like recollections scribbled in a diary than fiction. What drew me to the book is the exotic title given to each story such as Quicquidlibet and Wasuremono . The author acknowledges her love for words which prompted her to weave the stories with the exotic titles. I soon fell in love with the writing more than the titles.    Most of the stories are about love and relationships though much of the love remains unrequited and the relationships remain distant. There is dulcet nostalgia in almost every story most of which are narrated in the first p