Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Happiness is a choice. Wandering on the rugged landscapes of Kerala’s folklore is a character popularly known as Naranath Bhranthan. Bhranthan in Malayalam means ‘lunatic’. Naranath Bhranthan was not really as mad as he pretended to be. He was an enlightened person. He understood the absurdity of life even more clearly than Albert Camus who employed Sisyphus to illustrate the absurdity of life. Sisyphus pushes a boulder uphill knowing fully well that the vindictive gods will push it down before it reaches the zenith just to mock him. He will put his shoulder to the boulder again and again with the full knowledge of his condemned fate. Sisyphus is happy, nevertheless, in Camus’s interpretation of the myth. For Camus’s Sisyphus, happiness is a choice. His happiness is his revenge against the gods who punished him. Kerala’s Naranath Bhranthan also rolled a boulder uphill. He was not punished by anyone, however. He chose to roll the boulder uphill and then push it down. H

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that system.   Though th

Image courtesy Scroll Any act of violence is a form of savagery; only the degree varies. The Hindu Mahasabha leader’s act of shooting at an effigy of Mahatma Gandhi, the father of the nation, is as much savagery as was Nathuram Godse’s attack on the real Gandhi. The woman did not stop at shooting Gandhi but went on to garland Godse, make a ritualistic offering to the killer and also distribute sweets to the onlookers. The organisers of the event also ensured that the effigy of Gandhi shed a blood-like liquid upon the shooting which added a high degree of perversion to the depraved episode.  What Godse did was to encounter one of the most peaceful ideologies (Gandhi’s version of non-violence) with the most violent response (murder). As mankind evolved we learnt to shun violence and have recourse to the legal system for resolving conflicts. Violence continued to be wielded by some people: criminals. Crime is a form of savagery, a negation of civilisation. Animals have fa

Fiction “Did you check your bumper result?” Anna asked as she dropped the chopped onion into the sizzling oil. “Not yet, not yet,” Chacko answered with visible impatience. “Where do I get time for anything once I put my hand to this?” He was kneading the dough for the parathas which the clients of the restaurant relished throughout the day. Chacko and Anna were the popular pair at the restaurant in the small town on the bank of the Periyar River. Chacko made the delicious parathas while Anna cooked the Kerala delicacies that accompanied the parathas. Both Chacko and Anna belonged to the social class that could never dream of any annual income which the government recently fixed as the limit for job quotas for the economically backward classes. The classes in the country and their various quotas never made any sense to Chacko and Anna except that they knew they never belonged to any of these privileged classes whichever party came to power. “Ten per cent jobs reserved

A part of my little library There was a time when I used to listen to the speeches of Osho Rajneesh on my cassette player. Osho spoke on and on while I cooked my meals in the tiny kitchen of my rented little house in Shillong. It was a pleasure listening to the old man. He could speak about almost anything under the sun and even beyond the sun. He had an exquisite sense of humour too. His speeches were interspersed with witty anecdotes or parables. I still remember some of those stories. Eventually I lost interest in Osho. Maybe I outgrew my protracted adolescent appetite for outlandish wisdom. The cassette player emanated songs instead of speeches.   For wisdom, I relied on books. Nothing can take the place of books when it comes to intellectual stimulation. What about audio books? This is the question raised at In[di]spire this week. I never listened to an audio book until I came across this topic. How can I write about it unless I listened to one? So I went to LibriV

The umbrella is your inevitable appendix if you live in Kerala. It used to hang on my shoulder as I trekked to school in my childhood. There were no folding umbrellas or pocket umbrellas in those days. My umbrella like most people’s was a half-metre long canopy with a ferrule that jutted out so that you could use the whole thing as a walking stick when it did not rain. The men’s umbrella had a curved handle which enabled you to suspend it on your shoulder if you didn’t want the walking stick. The rains lashed Kerala for nearly half the year in those days and hence the umbrella was a loyal friend and as cumbersome too. The fidelity of the umbrella continued when I left the state to take up my first job in Shillong as a teacher. Shillong too had quite a lot of rains in those days with its proximity to Cherrapunji. Eventually, however, the rains in Shillong became as flighty and coquettish as the place itself and Cherrapunji lost its designation as the place of heaviest rainfall

One of the hundreds of pics I clicked at Sawan School, Delhi. There are 2 parrots on that tree. The tree and the parrots are memories that linger funnily with pain. [pic from 2014] Gabriel Garcia Marquez suggests in Love in the Time of Cholera that we manage to endure the burden of the past because the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good. Maybe, nothing substantially good ever happened to me because my endeavours to magnify happy memories fall by the wayside refusing to go far enough. It’s not that I don’t want happy memories.   Who doesn’t? But I have imagined happy memories. I’m more like Sara Teasdale. Stephen kissed her in the spring and Robin in the fall. Stephen’s kiss was lost in jest and Robin’s in play. But Colin’s eyes haunted her night and day though Colin only looked at her and never kissed at all. Unheard melodies are sweeter, I can hear Keats moaning. In the dust-ridden lanes of the past, I look for the unheard melodies, I feel the se