Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Book Review The meaning and purpose of life are themes that have enchanted thinkers from time immemorial. Philosophers and psychologists have given us umpteen theories on them. Novelists have entertained us with gripping stories about the same. Manu Joseph’s novel, The Illicit Happiness of Other People , is another gripping novel on the theme of life’s meaning and purpose. The real protagonist of the novel, 17 year-old Unni Chacko, is dead three years before the novel begins. He jumped to his death from the terrace of his three storey apartment. Why did he commit suicide when he was a brilliant student and exceptionally gifted cartoonist? His father, Ousep Chacko, wants to find it out and the novel is about that quest. Ousep is an alcoholic. Once upon a time he was a promising writer. Now he is a mediocre journalist and a total failure as a husband and father to Mariamma and Thoma respectively. Mariamma would love to see him dead and even thinks of killing him. Ou

Pretending is one of the keys to happiness, says Nat King Cole in the above song. "Pretending isn't very hard to do," he says. Most of us do pretend quite a lot. We pretend to be very spiritual or religious just because most others do the same thing and we don't want to be odd ones out. We pretend to be tolerant when we are actually afraid to question what we know is wrong. Some people pretend to be nationalists when their actual problem is an identity crisis. There is an increasing tribe of people in contemporary India whose love for a certain animal is nothing more than a mask placed over their snarling hatred of a particular community of people.  In spite of these negative examples I've cited, Nat King Cole is right. Pretending expedites happiness. If you can smile when your inner world is actually crumbling, you are likely to attract the better things in the world to you and thus mitigate your misery.  Going one more step ahead, if you start pretendin

Image from Wikipedia Character is something deeply ingrained and difficult to change, according to most psychologists including Eric Fromm. Fromm believed that character stems from our genetic inheritance and our learning experiences. Some aspects of our character come from our parents. They are in our genes and we don’t have much choice about them. Other aspects are learnt from home, school and society. There is also a lot of interplay between the two. It is not easy to change one’s character which is formed in one’s childhood mostly. Certain traumatic experiences bring about major changes in a person’s character. A better way to bring about radical changes is self-awareness. Fromm divides people into 5 personality types. 1. The Receptive Type People of this type are passive and almost totally dependent on others. They require constant support from somebody or the other, like the family, friends or some group.   They lack confidence in their own abilities and

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