Tomichan Matheikal's blog

The Way longs to be born The tragedy of the contemporary world is not so much that there is a dearth of human values as that hardly anyone seems to be interested in values at all. People have not only accepted that corruption is an integral part of politics, religion and any system but have also started justifying it. It is quite scary when prominent BJP leaders like Nitin Gatkari and Amit Shah tell us frankly that their party’s electoral promises were not made seriously. While the former said that the promises were made because they had never imagined the party to win the elections, the latter bluntly called the promises “ chunavi jumla ” [electoral gimmick]. What is bizarre is that people accept such explanations as morally right. People like Gatkari and Shah have gifted the country a new ethical code by which anything and everything is alright as long as you are a winner. Their supreme pontiff, Narendra Modi, marched to glorious heights by doing things that would make t

Devil’s Advocate is Karan Thapar’s memoirs which I’m currently reading. One of the first chapters is dedicated to his wife Nisha who was a Goan Catholic whom he met in London and fell in love with. He agreed to marry her in the church and the priest who blessed their wedding was Father Terry Gilfedder who was an enlightened priest, according to Thapar. “He was the first Catholic priest I got to know,” says Thapar about Father Terry. “And he’s the only genuine man of God I have ever met. So when I encounter others of the cloth, I judge them by his standards. They always fall short.” Giving due respect to Thapar’s faith, Father Terry asked him to choose a passage from the Bhagavad Gita instead of the biblical passage usually read during the wedding mass. But Thapar was not familiar with the Gita. Hence the priest chose a passage from Kahlil Gibran instead. Thapar questioned the priest whether such “cross-cultural ecumenism” was permitted by the church. Father Terry’s answer

I have on occasion described my life as a series of blunders. The mistakes taught me the inevitable lessons too. Perhaps, what makes life really meaningful, if not particularly charming, are the lessons we learn from our own mistakes. The errors and the subsequent learnings indicate that we have been on a quest of our own instead of blindly embracing given truths. “The biggest mistake of my life was joining St Edmund’s as a lecturer,” as I write in my forthcoming memoirs, Autumn Shadows . “Shame was the ultimate gift I received from St Edmund’s, the ultimate recompense of the narcissist.” Narcissism is a grave sin unless you know how to piggyback on it to conquer peaks of success. I was a born loser for whom success was a tantalising mirage. The Principal, staff and students of Edmund’s caught hold of the shame of the loser in me, shook it out and held it up for the whole world to see. Then I became less than the shame. The world will love narcissists provided they know ho

My Dictator French writer Anatole France was of the opinion that “Until one has loved an animal a part of one’s soul remains unawakened.” I would have laughed at him until a few months back. Animals were a strict no for me until a kitten walked into my life quite unexpectedly. I used to associate animals with filth and I was fastidious about cleanliness inside and around my home. Maggie was even more fastidious than me. So when Kittu came along we naturally kept him outside the house. We fed him regularly but he meant nothing more to us than an animal that had to be kept off our personal limits. Eventually, however, we started buying the food which he liked keeping aside our own tastes. It was then that Maggie and I started realising that Kittu had become an integral part of our meagre family. He soon found his place inside the house. Within no time he became the master of the house. Both Maggie and I wondered how we learnt to tolerate his omnipresent dictatorship.

I never loved anyone until I married at the age of 35. Maggie taught me love with her agonised endurance of my narcissistic whims and fancies. I was not aware of her agonies until the bubble of my ego burst under certain pressures imposed on it brutally by a few self-appointed benefactors. While I’m grateful to the benefactors for their ruthless devotion to their task, I could never forget the fact that they overdid it with more zeal than the medieval crusaders. Some scars left by crusaders remain with you until your end. The lessons are obvious enough, however. One, love endures, agonises and transforms. As one of the first Christian missionaries, Saint Paul, said, “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” [ 1 Corinthians 13:7 ] Saint Paul was an ardent crusader too. But he knew that “Love always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.” He did not say that love transforms. But it does. Maggie transformed me. Years

Fiction I had just finished reading Ponkunnam Varkey’s short story about a priest, his sexton and their sex lives when the TV news registered the address of Bishop Franco for sexual offences against a nun. The bishop was in news for quite some time and so his arrest did not come as a tremor to me though later I learnt that it was incredible to many Catholics in Kerala. “What is incredible?” My friend Tom asked me. He is a blogger with quite some conceit. His conceit had attracted the attention of the Catholic clergy time and again in the past though of late they seemed to have given him up probably as a hopeless case. I don’t like his conceit either. But I tolerate it because I’m more conceited than him according to my wife. Long before the arrest of the bishop, Tom had written a blog about him titled Why Franco Mulakkal should be a saint . When I questioned his prejudiced condemnation of the bishop as well as the Church, he suggested Ponkunnam Varkey’s story to me. Ther

The nation is gearing up to celebrate the 150 th birthday of Mahatma Gandhi with an array of year-long programmes. Undoubtedly the great soul deserves the celebration. Gandhi was one of the greatest souls that ever walked on the earth. India has been converted into a quagmire that inevitably submerges any Gandhian value or principle that dares to make its presence palpable. Gandhi was religious but genuinely so. For him religion was a tool to make himself a better human being day after day. It was his spiritual sustenance. It helped him see other human beings as sparks of the divine. It enabled him to love every person as his brother or sister. He had no enemies. Even the British were not his enemies, as he declared time and again. Religion would never make Gandhi sectarian; on the contrary, it gifted him with universal love. Truth was the foundation of Gandhi’s morality. Every genuine life is an endless quest after truth and Gandhi’s life was nothing else. He experimented