Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Kerala coast: A photo from the year 1900 A century and a quarter ago, Swami Vivekananda called Kerala “a lunatic asylum.”   The prevalent caste system demeaned all but the Brahmins and their associates. The Namboothiri men could have sex with the Nair women of their choice by an arrangement called Sambandam [morganatic marriage]. The upper caste men brazenly exploited the women of the lower castes. Women of the lower castes were forbidden from covering their breasts. Women were treated on the whole as nothing better than goods and chattels. According to a legend, Kerala was created by Parasuram, an incarnation of God Vishnu. This divine avatar did not hesitate to kill his own mother and brothers just to please the ego of his father. The father’s ego was hurt merely because his wife admired a prince who was bathing in the river along with his women. Marital fidelity is an Indian wife’s bounden duty. No other man should enter even her thoughts though the man could enter any

Kayamkulam Kochunni is Kerala’s own Robin Hood. He is believed to have lived in the 19 th century and his tomb is still preserved in good condition at the Pettah Juma Masjid in Thiruvananthapuram. There is a shrine dedicated to him in Kozhencherry, Kerala. A new Malayalam movie was released last week based on his legends and whatever history is available. This is not a review of the movie though I watched it yesterday with much interest. The cinematography is excellent and the landscapes refuse to leave your memory long after the movie is over. What fascinated me really is the theme of exploitation of the poor by the rich, the powerless by the powerful. “Who makes the rules?” Kochunni asks at one part of the movie. He gives the answer too: “The Brahmins make the rules for their own benefits. Why should we obey them?” Kochunni becomes a brigand. The social system makes him one, rather. Certain higher caste people made use of him for their personal aggrandizement and

My first trekking in the Garhwal Himalayas was a decade and a half back. Along with a few colleagues, I was asked to take a group of students to Hemkund whose altitude is about 15,000 feet. On the first day we trekked from Govindghat to Ghangaria. It took us almost the whole day to reach our destination because it was raining in the entire afternoon and we were not prepared for it. Drenched to the marrow of our bones, we continued to climb up and up ignoring the weariness that knocked inexorably against our knees. We reached our destination by sunset. An icy cold bath in the morning filled me with the vigour required for the next lap of the trek, the steep ascent from Ghangaria to Hemkund. That first date of mine with the mountains urged me to undertake many more treks to equally challenging peaks in the Garhwal Himalayas in the next many years. I cannot claim that I learnt to trust the mountains blindly, but I realised that the mountains have a unique charm and that they off

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.