Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Passion fruits in my backyard (a few months ago) When I had a chance to dine out, my usual choice was Chinese cuisine in my youth. A little fried rice with some chilly chicken, and possibly a bit of noodles too as a starter. I was particularly fond of Chinese style soups but marriage put an end to that like, less because marriage put me in the soup than because Maggie had a particular aversion towards soups of all sorts. She didn’t quite agree that a first-rate soup was far superior to a second-rate book. Eventually I grew out of the Chinese kitchen probably by Maggie’s influence and cultivated a love for the Shillong version of biryani which tasted more like the Chinese fried rice with a piece or two of chicken buried in it than any biryani I ever tasted before or after. The transition was smooth because Shillong’s biryani was more Chinese than Indian. Delhi, later, introduced me to all sorts of North Indian delicacies: Punjabi and Mughalai, particularly. However, our

A corner of my garden Finally the summer shower came as a relief. The temperature had risen to a record high. The earth was scorched. The heat singed the soul. Plants withered and flowers wilted. Only the plastic flowers on the drawing room chest remained as fresh as ever. One good shower is enough for the earth to revitalise itself. Give her one more and she returns the colours and tangs. There was just one zinnia in my garden which Maggie had plucked from the roadside during one of her walks and I planted in a little corner of the crowded garden. “Garden?” My friend raised his eyebrows when I mentioned the word once. “Call it forest, if you prefer,” I said. My garden looks more like a patch of jungle where there nature creates its own mess, beautiful mess. Beauty is subjective. A couple of summer showers brought alive the seeds that lay buried in the parched soil. And the zinnias bloomed. They bloomed in red and white and yellow and pink. That’s another miracle o

Book Review The most authentic people are those who quest after truth. The quest can be extremely agonising and even life-threatening when it questions certain truths that are held as absolutes by large numbers of people. Ayyan Hirsi Ali undertook that quest and her book Infidel: my life is the story of that quest. The book has two parts which are titled ‘My Childhood’ and ‘My Freedom’. Born in Somalia, the author had a terrible childhood that was totally controlled by the rigid traditions and conventions of her clan and her religion. Somalia practises a very fundamentalist version of Islam which regards girls as subhuman creatures who have to be subservient to men in every imaginable way. A woman is not supposed to have any individuality of her own in that version of Islam. She is a man’s slave. Even as a wife, she is not supposed to enjoy her sexuality; her religion sews up her sex in the ritual of female circumcision. She is only a hatchery for producing offspring for

One of the classical love stories in Malayalam literature is Thakazhi’s Chemmeen (Shrimp). When the novel became a popular movie in Kerala, I was just 5 years old. Two generations later, neither the novel nor the movie is likely to ring any bell though the theme of love can never vanish from literature and arts. The love affair in the story is inter-religious. A pretty Hindu girl is in love with a young Muslim trader. Today a lot of political organisations would have cried foul and shouts of “Love jihad” would have rent the heavens. Some seven decades ago, people weren’t more broadminded. If nationalist politics has arrogated to itself the chastity of Indian love today, religion had its own characteristic way of subjugating human passions in the olden days. Karuthamma’s love for Pareekutty withers in the fire of the traditions that her mother lights around her. Karuthamma marries Palani, an orphan discovered by her father during one of his fishing expeditions. Eventuall

Religious nationalism is more dangerous than religious fundamentalism because it plays with two identities: religious and national. All of a sudden people belonging to all religious faiths except that of the majority become enemies if not traitors. The five years of Mr Narendra Modi’s reign have converted India into what some observers have labelled as “a Republic of Hate ”. Muslims, Christians and even Hindu Dalits have been the targets of violent attacks during the last five years. Anyone who questions such attacks and intolerance is labelled as anti-national. The only true patriot in present India is a militant Hindu who carries the venom of hatred in his heart. The Prime Minister and his confidante Mr Amit Shah also express their hatred for the minority communities in their speeches and even go to the extent of making venomous statements against certain states and regions of the country which are populated by Muslims and Christians. Mr Modi’s utterance about Mr Rahul Gand

My beloved writer Albert Camus said, “Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.” I have almost completed a book titled Autumn Shadows . It is my own story, a sort of autobiography. Forgive the presumptuousness of a very ordinary person who dares to write a memoir. Every person has a story to tell, I’m sure. I don’t know how interesting my story is. I had to tell it for my own reasons. Let me give a short extract from that book here. The memoir will be published soon as an e-book soon at Amazon. This is a hype that I’m trying to create in the autumn of my life when every leaf is turning out to be a flower, a beautiful flower.  Here’s the extract from the first chapter. Insects come to die in my living room. Every morning I sweep them into the dustpan from beneath the fluorescent lamp where they lie dead in a heap of atomic dark spots while Maggie prepares the morning’s red tea flavoured with a leaf or two of tulsi or mint picked freshly from our little kitchen g

It is rather hard to believe that you get rewarded according to your deeds when you live in a world in which the wicked flourish and the righteous perish. You see mass murderers mount high pedestals and preach dharma to the people. Swindlers are winners and the honest lose out pathetically in the rat race that life has been converted into. There is no morality or dharma in the universe. The planets may follow their orbits; that is gravity, not dharma. The stars shine; that’s thermodynamics, not moral benevolence. That world of stars and planets can also buffet you with storms and other cataclysms. We can take such cataclysms as punishments for our misdeeds: punishment from gods or the universe itself. That is a matter of belief. In the world of belief, just anything is possible. Angels can become demons and vice-versa. That is the power of belief. Do you know about people like Joan of Arc who were burnt at the stake as the foulest heretics and then later were declared sa