Tomichan Matheikal's blog

I am not a nationalist. That does not make me antinational. Rather, it makes me more human; it makes me a person who is open to other cultures and languages, religions and lifestyles. I often imagine myself as a bird to which borders and fences mean nothing. The bird can fly across the Line of Control to Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and further to Pakistan and then to Afghanistan and beyond, without a passport and visa. But I am not a bird, alas. I am a man without wings except in my imagination. So I need to respect what other men respect: borders and fences. Hence I have acquired a passport which shows my nationality indubitably. Yes, I belong to a nation. Does that make me a nationalist? Should it? Nation-states are human creations for the convenience of administration. People need to erect fences and say this is our area and you can’t transgress. That’s fine. I have no issues with that. But why should that make me hate the fellow on the other side of the fence? Natio

I wish to present a few quotes from my own book, Autumn Shadows . The purpose, obviously, is to tempt you to buy a copy of the book. Let me caution you that it is an e-book and it has no print version.  Quotes: Guilt is the very foundation of Christianity.   Man is a fallen creature, according to its theology.   The Bible begins with the Fall of Adam and Eve from divine grace.   The biblical history of mankind begins with an irate God who hurls curses on the first man and the first woman.   Having subordinated the woman to the man, God gifts her the severe pain of childbearing as a punishment for her sins.   He curses the whole ground on which Adam was to walk and work. Guilt is the very foundation of Christianity.   Man is a fallen creature, according to its theology.   The Bible begins with the Fall of Adam and Eve from divine grace.   The biblical history of mankind begins with an irate God who hurls curses on the first man and the first woman.   Having subordinated the woman

Image from Outlook , 10 April 2018 That article is worth reading; click here to read. I don’t want to be a spoilsport on a great occasion like the Independence of my country. Wish you a Happy Independence Day. Are we independent, however? I belong to the old generation most among whom believe with Mahatma Gandhi that independence is not just a political matter. Independence is much more than liberation from colonial rule. Have we really come a great way from those days when the British treated us as just goods and chattel? I doubt. Of course, quite many things have improved. The country’s statisticians tell me so. For example, India was food deficient when the country became independent in 1947. Today we have excess of food. Yet today thousands of Indians go hungry! Tons of food just go waste in our warehouses. As long as there is even one citizen who goes hungry in a country, that country cannot be considered independent. It is enslaved by poverty or injus

I wanted to celebrate this Independence by rereading the classic work, Freedom at Midnight . The exercise which began a month back is over today. A book which sold millions of copies and found thousands of fans need no review now. However, I’m writing this piece just to remind the younger generation that there is a work like this which is worth spending time on if they wish to understand India better. The massive book which runs into several hundred pages covers just one year in India’s painful history: 1947. It begins with the arrival of the Mountbattens in India at the turn of the New Year and ends with the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi a year later. We meet a lot of Indians between the Mountbattens’ reluctant flight to Delhi and the mournful cremation of the Mahatma in Raj Ghat. Nehru and Patel, Jinnah and Savarkar, and a whole lot of average Indians come vividly alive in these pages. The book was written after a protracted research by the authors, Dominique Lapier

Article 370 had to go long ago. Most of the special statuses given to various states at the time of India’s Independence became redundant as time passed. They should have, at least. If they persisted for decades, it means they were not effective and not serving their purpose. So better alternatives were required. Kashmir was a mistake right from the beginning. Just because the king there happened to be a Hindu, the state became a part of India. Of course, Nehru had a role in that too. It was not, however, “rank hypocrisy” that prompted Nehru to accede Kashmir to India, as suggested by eminent columnist Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyar in today’s [11 Aug 2019] Times of India [in his column pertinently titled Next Step: A West Bank in Kashmir? ]. Nehru was essentially romantic, and the roots of his romanticism lay in the miscegenated culture of Kashmir. Who but a romantic would describe a place as “supremely beautiful woman whose beauty is almost impersonal and above desire”?

The first time I voted in a political election was when I was 43. It was for the Delhi assembly election. I had migrated to Delhi just two years prior that election. Before that I lived in Shillong for 15 long years without ever getting an opportunity to vote since I was a dkhar (outsider) there. [Read more about all that in my memoir: Autumn Shadows .] I have been a responsible voter ever since Delhi gave me the citizen’s right. However, my voting right makes no sense to me now. So I’m seriously considering giving up that right. Do I live in a democracy at all? Indian democracy today is not unlike the scenario of two wolves and one sheep voting on what to have for dinner. You know who the two wolves are. You may be yet to realise that you are the sheep. Two citizens, just two, decide what 1340 million people want or should want. That’s present India. The 1340 million are just one sheep. The wolves tell us that they have been given the mandate to impose their wil

Unless you're willing to be hurt, do not start loving  another person. Love hurts. There's no escape. Love is an ocean of  feelings. And feelings are brittle. People throw all sorts of things into that ocean. Their bottles of frustration, the effluent of their sorrows, and all the bilge water in their boats, all are hurled into the ocean.  They  think the ocean is the right place for all that. They think the ocean is an infinite receptacle, a crucible that melts anything and everything.  Humans love to leave their marks wherever they can. They would have left them on the pages of history if they could. Normally, however, they leave it in your heart. "The marks humans leave are too often scars," as John Green said.  That's okay, but. What's life without those scars? It is those scars that make life worthwhile. Happiness leaves no marks. Happiness teaches no lessons. Happiness is not human; it belongs to angelic realms, too ethereal, as unreal as the fairie