Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Traditions are not sacrosanct. As time changes, as our understanding of the universe improves, as civilization grows, traditions may have to change. Many traditions have changed. For example, we got rid of the tradition of burning the widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. Different states in India had various traditional measures to stigmatise the lower caste or untouchable people. Most of these traditions have vanished though some linger on in certain places. The less there is to justify a tradition, the harder it is to get rid of it, said Mark Twain. Tradition, more often than not, is an excuse to avoid thinking. Human civilisation would have remained in its primitive stages if everyone had remained stuck to traditions. Good traditions should be preserved, of course. What is good, however? One may argue that whatever is associated with religion is good. Is it? Don’t forget that religious traditions have been responsible for much of the exploitation of certain

With Maggie at Badrinath Hindu temples used to fascinate me. There is a unique aura of mystery exuded by their very architecture. When I was a little boy I wished to enter the temple premises in my village. But the bold writing on the wall of that temple, “Non-Hindus are not allowed to enter,” kept me out. That writing vanished some time after I actually entered that temple. The curiosity of a little boy was what drew me in one day while I passed by that temple, as I always did, while going for my evening bath in the nearby river. I stood in that dark chamber for hardly a minute when someone whispered in my ear to get out before I would stir up a communal riot in the village. I visited scores of Hindu temples later in various parts of the country including Badrinath in the Garhwal Himalayas, Kamakhya in Guwahati and Gaumukh in Mount Abu. All those temples fascinated me for reasons which I never tried to analyse. It was a kind of instinctual fascination, I think. It was a s

One purpose of religions is to keep certain sections of people under subjugation. The easiest way of subjugating people is to give them rules and regulations in the name of their god(s). The caste system in India is an example. Another example is the place of women in society. All major religions in the world have kept women under male domination. The Bible, for instance, begins with laying on the woman the whole onus for man’s sinfulness. Then came the various ‘fathers’ of the Church to reinforce that male domination with their divine revelations. Saint Paul, for example, was an incorrigible male chauvinist.  Perhaps, no other religion is as misogynistic as the Catholic Church whose holy Patriarchs have time and again denounced woman as the cause of all human evils. Thomas Aquinas, whose philosophy and theology play a major role even today in the formation houses of Catholic priests, viewed woman as a “defective and misbegotten” creature born out of the defective part o

A part of the staff quarters demolished partly by RSSB initially and left as such for months just to demoralise the staff I had a colleague in Delhi who fought two successive cases in the court of justice in order to get his job back. Let me call him Sachin. He won the first case and arrived at a compromise in the second. He went through veritable hells during his fights but never lost his optimism. Yesterday when I posited a question on Facebook whether the Karnataka by-election results were an indication of people’s disillusionment with the BJP, Sachin was one of the first to assert confidently, “Surely not.” Sachin was a math teacher in the senior secondary section which already had another math teacher. He was brought in because students were unhappy with the existing teacher. It is quite difficult to be a popular math teacher and Sachin too faced an uphill task which eventually became too daunting especially with the uncooperative attitude of the management and a sect

“Vengeance is mine.” God claims in the Bible. [Deuteronomy 32:35, and many other places] “God is a mean-spirited, pugnacious bully bent on revenge against His children for failing to live up to His impossible standards.” Walt Whitman   Image courtesy Robert Hatfield I wish moral vengeance was a natural law like gravitation. The law of gravitation will wreak its revenge on you if you try to fly from the top of a building. Similarly if there was a natural law for immoral acts, there would be no evil in the world. For example, if you do evil to a person nature will punish you with a proportionate evil. But nature knows no such morality. On the contrary, nature has an unbalanced proportion of evil. Human civilisations have been relentless efforts to bring nature’s evil under man’s control. And morality is man’s effort to bring under control the evil within himself. Religions are supposed to assist man in the process of making himself virtuous. That they have failed in

Suresh 'Bhaiyyaji' Joshi V. S. Naipual, during his 2004 visit to India, described Ayodhya as “a sort of passion to be encouraged.” His argument was that passion leads to creativity and Indians are rather short of creativity. Indians seem to be better at demolitions, riots and destruction. Even when we speak about constructing a temple at Ayodhya, destructive malevolence seems to run at the bottom of the desire. For almost two centuries, Ayodhya has been a potent metanarrative in India, especially for the North Indian Hindus. Various people and political parties have used it effectively for rousing up the passions of large numbers of people. Finally when the Babri Masjid was demolished in 1992 under the pontificate of L. K. Advani, Ayodhya lost its emotional fervour at least for a while. Justifying the demolition Champat Rai, a joint general secretary of Vishwa Hindu Parishad [VHP], said that the Babri Masjid was a “signpost of slavery for over 450 years and the

Who is taller? Image courtesy Hindustan Times I feel proud to belong to the country that boasts of the tallest statue in the world. Silly countrymen tell me that the amount of money spent on that statue is far more than the entire annual tax revenue of many states in the country. They argue that while China is spending money on railroads across oceans, we are inane to spend it on a statue for vultures to ensconce themselves. I liked the metaphor of vultures though I think that it is quite antinational in the context. Was Shah Jahan a vulture when he built the Taj Mahal while a lion’s share of his population lived in leaky huts? Shah Jahan spent the country’s wealth on things like the Peacock Throne which was embedded with the most coveted diamonds and pearls. Though the throne vanished from history like many other things, the mausoleum remains. Through that mausoleum Shah Jahan remains. The tallest statue in the world is our own cultural emperor’s ingenious strategy to