Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Book Review Title: RSS: A View to the Inside Authors: Walter K. Andersen & Shridhar D. Damle Publisher: Penguin Random House India, 2018 Pages: 405 [256 without Appendices and Notes] The authors wrote another book on RSS 30 years ago. This new book takes a look at the organisation as it stands today in a different India which has catapulted it from the grey sidelines to the limelight. The book reads almost like an apology for the RSS. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh emerges in the book as a great organisation with some very noble objectives the primary of which is to “create a cadre of men who would unify a highly pluralistic country, using their own perfected behaviour as a model for other Indians” [xii]. The authors go to the extent of drawing some parallels with the Luther-led reformations that rocked the Roman Catholic Church. Even as Luther’s dramatic actions were rooted in his ‘crisis of identity’, “the RSS and its affiliates have also sought to prov

A part of my bookshelf Happiness is as simple and frugal as a glass of wine or a roast chestnut. I learned that from a book which I have read again and again, one of my favourite books. It is Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis. I was introduced to Kazantzakis in my mid-twenties by a casual acquaintance. “Have you read The Last Temptation of Christ ?” I was asked. I had heard about the book but was not aware that it was available at the Ernakulam Public Library whose member I was in those days. I made a beeline to the library as soon as I learnt about its availability. The book engrossed me so much that I sat up a whole night to read the latter half. I was hooked to Kazantzakis. I read all of his books which were available in that library and later at the State Central Library in Shillong. Later when I was teaching in Delhi I got personal copies of both Zorba and The Last Temptation . I don’t know how many times I have returned to Zorba . I could just open any page

Russell Joy speaking at the seminar at Vazhakulam I spent the weekend evening listening to a lecture on the threat posed to the state of Kerala by the Mullaperiyar dam. The speaker was Advocate Russell Joy, one who has been crusading for quite a while for the decommissioning of the dam. Recently he got a court order to maintain the water level in the dam at 139 feet instead of 142 as stubbornly demanded by Tamil Nadu. What precisely are the problems caused by the dam? How did these problems arise? I was curious to know and was happy to listen to Advocate Joy who has become quite an authority on the subject because of the relentless research he has done. First of all, the dam’s lifespan was 50 years, says the advocate. The engineer who designed it had declared that. The dam was repaired by Tamil Nadu and some support structures were added. Such a support is no guarantee whatever. The dam may give way at any time. During the recent deluge that engulfed Kerala, Tamil

Lying to yourself is one of the most self-destructive things, said one of Dostoevsky’s characters. “The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him or around him and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.” Have we as a nation arrived at the zenith of falsehood and the consequent impotence to love? The latest incident that makes me raise this question is the removal of the CBI chief Alok Verma and his entire team. The Prime Minister misused his powers to take this illegal and unconstitutional action. As the Opposition has pointed out, “The only plausible explanation for this desperate and hasty move is an attempt to scuttle the ongoing investigations into the Special Director’s [Rakesh Asthana who is Modi’s mole] cases that might cause significant embarrassment to [the] Government.” Too many individuals who became a threat to the Prime Minister’s d

Let idealism live as long as it can! A group of my students visited an industry today as part of their curricular activity. They returned looking very ebullient because the industrial complex looked perfect to them: immaculately clean, professionally managed, subsidised food in the canteen, a managing director who is not only highly religious but also an excellent motivational speaker, and so on. They were also given a gift hamper each which contained the religious publications of the organisation that runs the industry. One of the students thrust into my hand a book written by the owner of the industry and said, “Sir, please read this.” I turned a few pages. I am a rapid reader. Within seconds I understood that the book was of no use to me. I returned it to the student saying, “I don’t think this will serve any purpose for me.” The student refused to take it back. She said, “Read it, Sir, for my sake.” I accepted it. I read most of it in a few minutes during my free period wh

Book Review The subtitle of Karan Thapar’s memoirs is The Untold Story . The tantalising nature of that notwithstanding, there is little that is particularly new in the book except certain personal details about the author in the first few chapters. The first 6 chapters are about the author’s childhood, youth and education. The remaining 11 are about the politicians he encountered along the way as a journalist and particularly about the interviews he had with them. The book was not meant to be a serious work, Thapar acknowledges in the Epilogue. He had time on his hands and a book of this kind felt “like an easy, even interesting, way of occupying” himself. Readability was his key concern, he says. And the book is eminently readable. It reads like a personal conversation that the author has with the reader. Thapar comes across as a thorough professional as an interviewer who is at the same time a friendly person provided one knows how to draw the line between professio

“School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is,” said Ivan Illich in his book, Deschooling Society . He went on to accuse the teaching-learning system of confusing “process and substance”. “Once these [process and substance] become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results… The pupil is thereby ‘schooled’ to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is ‘schooled’ to accept service in place of value.” Half a century after Illich wrote those words, the academic situation has only worsened. It is producing robots with specialised expertise but without certain desirable values. This has happened largely because we live in a global system that has given undue importance to wealth and wealth creation. Wealth is the ultimate determiner of success in the globalised world.