Tomichan Matheikal's blog

We encounter a lot of people in our day to day life. Quite many of them leave traces of themselves somewhere in our psyche. Some create ripples on the surface and vanish. Deep impressions are left by a few. A handful may choose to leave scars too. A little bit of you lies within me and as much of me may lie within you too. I remember hundreds of people who passed by me as colleagues or co-travellers, who sat with me as friends in my moments of grief and those who might have been victims of my associations with them. A little bit of them went into the making of what I am today. A little bit of you continues to add nuances to my psyche. More often than not, we may not be aware of the bits and pieces of ourselves that we leave within others. As a teacher, I have had umpteen experiences of youngsters telling me how I influenced their thinking though I was never aware of the potential impact of certain things I said or did. Just the other day I received a series of messages on

The following is an edited version of a speech I delivered this morning to an assembly of about 2000 students. We are at the threshold of a new academic session. A new beginning. Life is full of new beginnings and old endings. Every day is a new beginning which ends with an old sunset. Today, however, is a special day. This day marks the beginning of a new session that will last a whole year. Every new beginning comes with a whole lot of promises. Every new beginning comes with an offer of magic, of magical transformations. You are all potential magicians. You love magic and you would love to be magicians too. The fact is that each one of you is a potential magician. Magic is a way of looking at life, a different way of looking at things. Perspective, that’s what it is. Perspective is a way of seeing reality. I’m sure some of you are familiar with the famous saying about the two men who looked out from the same window. Two men looked out from the same window. One saw m

The novel I’m reading now is Paul Zacharia’s A Secret History of Compassion . It is a bizarrely funny novel that takes absurdity to its possible extremes. The reader is transported to a different world altogether; a different world where he experiences déjà vu moment after moment. In the beginning I thought I had wasted money on the book because it read like a silly fairy tale for adults. Gradually it dawned on me that the novelist was presenting our own current reality of hollow patriotism, twisted truths, and perverted religions in a manner that is consciously designed to provoke us out of our passivity or resignation. One of the women encountered by the protagonist, Lord Spider, during his morning walk is Mrs Nair who "died" (not really) during the night and probably didn’t know that she had died. Spider tries to bring the fact to her attention. The mention of death elicits an incident from Mrs Nair’s life. Her lover was at the railway station waiting for his trai

I could never bring myself to like Hindi and I’ve never ceased to regret that dislike. Most of my professional life was spent in the North and Northeast where Hindi was the lingua franca. I had to manage with pidgin Hindi while dealing with vegetable vendors and auto drivers. My ignorance of Hindi became a pain in my posterior particularly when I travelled by the city buses in Shillong where I worked for 15 long years. Those were tiny buses which could accommodate no more than 20 to 25 passengers but would normally have double that number. “ Aage badho ,” the conductor would shout all the time and give the passengers a jab each. “Don’t jab,” I longed to say in Hindi and I never could. Even if I learnt the Hindi equivalent of that phrase, it would serve no purpose as I wouldn’t be able to continue the unpleasant exchange that would ensue.   The bus conductors in Shillong of those days regarded themselves as tribal warlords. My hostile confrontation with Hindi began when I was pro

Siren [Image from Ancient History ] Criminals rule India while intellectuals are consigned to the prison. The Association for Democratic Reforms says that “there is an increase of 109% in the number of MPs with declared serious criminal cases since 2009” in India. 116 MPs of the ruling BJP are criminals and they will be legislating the future of the country. Many of them are not just the usual kind of assaulters, thugs, rapists or murderers; they are people driven by hatred for a particular community in the country. This makes the scenario more precarious than the usual criminals who used to enter politics earlier. Many of the present MPs who have been given ministerial berths are people who openly professed their hatred for whole sections of Indian population. No less a personage than the present Home Minister of the country is a man who has vowed to “purge” the country of all “infiltrators except Buddha (sic), Hindus and Sikhs”. His term for certain Muslims in the c

“Specialization is for insects,” said Robert Anson Heinlein. A human being should be able to handle his/her children, prepare food, manage the society, work with a smartphone, and so on. Add as many things as you want to that list like fight occasional depression, stay clear of maniacs and fanatics and a whole lot of people, weed your garden, or whatever. When I was a student, a teacher of mine defined specialisation as studying more and more about less and less until you know everything about nothing. The teacher was a Ph.D. himself. Later on, as a post-graduate, when I wished to do Ph.D. I thought of the giggle of Salman Rushdie’s Satan in his Satanic Verses . No guide would accept a thesis about a hair in Satan’s tail, my friend dissuaded me. That friend had chosen to specialise on the role of Fate’s star in Thomas Hardy’s moral cosmos. He went on to become a Doctor of Philosophy who had specialised on the impact of Fate on Tess of the d’Urbervilles’ hymen. I went on to str

The last two books I ordered came as hardbound editions with prices slashed to half. I usually wait patiently for the economic paperback editions when books are published since I can’t afford to pay the hefty prices of hardbound editions. However, nowadays I keep getting hardbound editions at amazingly low prices. That’s fine. But the problem is that the hardbound books occupy too much space on the shelf and I’ll soon run out of that space. We live in a world of ebooks. I chose to publish my latest book as an ebook with no print version for many reasons, the first being a fear that it wouldn’t sell much in the print version. However, all the reviews I’ve got so far whether in public spaces or private have been very positive. Yet I don’t intend to bring out a print version. There are very few serious readers today. Mine is a serious book and a personal narrative too. If well-known writers can’t manage to sell their hardbound editions, what should I expect of my book? Tha