Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Neither Narendra Modi nor Amit Shah knows how to handle failure, it seems. There is audible rumbling within BJP about the majestic leaders’ refusal to share the blame for the devastating failure of the party in the recent elections. They have held “victory marches” whenever the party won an election in the past four years to take the credit. Why not share the blame now? Failure is not fatal, but the refusal to accept it gracefully and learn the required lessons is. That is the most fundamental principle about failure. Perhaps the only useful thing about failure is the learning of the inevitable lessons. Those who sulk over it, those who rationalise the failure, or those pass the blame to others don’t learn the necessary lessons and stop far short of being great in any way. BJP’s failure in the recent elections in five states has been too resounding to be ignored. The whole country has been looking forward to hear from the two great leaders about how they view the failure

It's been quite a journey together Some nights are very didactic if not entertaining. Last night was one such series of dreams. I wake up from one dream only to glide into another as seamlessly as a train stopping at a station and then moving on. They are not nightmares. On the contrary, they are quite amusing. Only two of last night’s dreams remained vividly in my conscious memory in the morning. In one, I was travelling by a bus with Maggie. Since the bus was overcrowded Maggie and I were in two different parts of the bus: the masculine and feminine halves of Kerala’s buses. Just before my stop arrived, which was near Maggie’s house, some passenger asked me a question. My answer started off a discussion which engaged me so much that I missed my stop and the next and the next. It’s only when Maggie’s call arrived on the mobile phone that I realised my mistake. Maggie awaited me at the right bus stop with her usual smile of amusement and sympathy. The other dream h

I felt immensely bad when I had to say No to a friend yesterday. He wanted my phone number and I didn’t give it. He became my friend through blogging. I love his blog posts and he hates mine. He is a supporter of BJP and I am an avowed opponent of BJP. He unfriended me from Facebook once and then befriended me again. I know that he is as good as I am. As passionate as I am about a whole lot of things. He loves life. He loves. Just like me. I love too. Love has no borders. Love knows no caste, no religion, not even gender. It is only those people who want to rule over others that bring restrictions in love. My love has no borders. So religious people hate me. My cat has no idea of religion, thank god. And he doesn’t need words either. Words. I hate them. I love them. I love them in writing. I don’t want to talk. I can’t. I hate it when I have to talk to people except my students. That’s why, dear friend, I had to say No to you yesterday. I know you are genuine. I know

In his 1962 book The Middle Passage , V S Naipaul described his native West Indian people as “half-made societies that seemed doomed to remain half-made”. His argument was that the people lacked self-knowledge or the will to reinvent themselves. I don’t know how far West Indies changed after that damning judgment of god-like Naipaul who made similar statements about India too in a later book of his. Naipaul was a ruthless writer with an ego that would give Narendra Modi’s ego a good run for all his (country’s) money. He had the messianic instincts without the necessary humility. Just like Modi, again. Just the antithesis of the Buddha, Jesus and the Mahatma. But Naipaul had brains of a different calibre in contradistinction to our own egotist par excellence. So he excelled in writing. Naipaul was a great writer. What is a writer without his ego? Without the conflicts within his soul? Without the struggles with his own inner hells? Naipaul won the Nobel Prize not for noth

Image from India Today On 6 Dec 1992, a huge battalion of people who called themselves kar sevaks (volunteers) led by Prime Ministerial aspirant L K Advani demolished the Babri Masjid in Ayodya. The professed goal was to strike down the historical symbol of Islamic ascendancy in the country and mark the beginning of a Hindu Rashtra. The real goal might have been to catapult BJP to political power and ensconce Advani in the PM’s chair. One of the few intellectuals who supported the move was Arun Shourie, an admired journalist in those days. Shourie wrote then that the Ayodhya events demonstrated “that the Hindus have now realized that they are in very large numbers, that their sentiment is shared by those who man the apparatus of the state, and that they can bend the state to their will.” He also expressed his hope that the Masjid demolition was “the starting point of a cultural awareness and understanding that would ultimately result in a complete restructuring of the Ind

Dear Modi-ji, I belong to your generation though I’m ten years younger than you. My memories about Nehru and other genuine Indian nationalists were shaped in more or less the same time-period as yours. Yet the memories differ tremendously: your villains like the Pundit and the Mahatma are my heroes. Do let me remind you of certain irrefutable facts. India was indeed fortunate to have a learned statesman like Nehru as its first Prime Minister. It is he who gave us the Navratna industries like the Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd, Hindustan Machine Tools, Bharat Heavy Electicals, and so on. Who established the steel plants in Bhilai, Rourkela, Durgapur and Bokaro? Who ushered in the technological revolution in India? Can we ever forget the marvellous contributions of the Council for Scientific Research (CSIR) which had labs all over the county? Can you recall the beginnings of the Atomic Energy Commission and Bhabha Atomic Research Centre?   Who started the IITs in Delhi, Bombay, Kanpu

Fiction My car growled on the first gear as it negotiated the steep ascent. It was a narrow road flanked with mammoth rubber trees that had outgrown their natural lifespan. Among those trees stood here and there like aberrations a few cashew trees and an occasional mango tree. Tall grass and weeds covered the entire ground. Why did Ananthavishnu buy a house in such a place? I wondered. But there was nothing surprising about it on second thoughts. Vishnu, as we called him usually, was always weird. He needed reasons, clear scientific reasons, for everything. When a girl of our class professed her love for him, he asked her, “Tell me at least one reason why you feel this way for me.” Vishnu and I studied five years together in college: pre-degree and graduation. He went on to study further until he obtained doctorate in astrophysics and landed a job in ISRO. I changed from science to literature and then became a teacher. Soon after his recent retirement he bought t