Tomichan Matheikal's blog

In his classical essay on meaning of life, The Myth of Sisyphus , Albert Camus cracks a joke. A madman is sitting beside a bathtub holding a fishing rod. The hook is in the bathtub. Seeing this, his psychiatrist asks him, “Hey chap, are they biting?” The madman answers, “No, you fool, this is only a bathtub.” We are not unlike that mad man in our search for the meaning of life. We know that there’s nothing to fish for when it comes to meaning in life. Yet we need meaning. Without it, life will be quite unbearable. Emptiness is what you feel unless you discover a meaning for your life. As we saw in the first part of this series, meaning is something we create rather than discover. Was the madman creating his meaning by sitting with a fishing rod knowing that he was not going to get any fish? Well, Camus argued that life was as absurd as that. His contemporary, Jean-Paul Sartre experienced the nausea of the meaningless human existence and went on to tell us why we need to cre

Most people, almost all normal ones, live their lives by the stories they tell about themselves and those others tell about them. As psychologist Gerald Corey says, “These stories actually shape reality in that they construct and constitute what we see, feel, and do.” Your personality is not a static entity which took shape at your birth once and for all. As you grew up physically, you encountered a lot of other people, situations, and forces that contributed into the ongoing shaping of your personality even if you didn’t want all that shaping. Your life is a story that continues to be written till your death. You are the ultimate writer of your own story though a whole lot of others make significant contributions which you can’t ignore. Every Othello has to meet his Iago. But the plot need not necessitate the murder of Desdemona. Every Hamlet has to deal with the demons of fraudulence. Mark Antony has a choice to not “let Rome in Tiber melt” and thus rewrite his story. Your

Protons and electrons won’t ever become gods though they are the fundamental truths of existence. Atoms and molecules don’t stir human emotions. Hence it is hard for science to offer transcendent meanings to man. Science is usually seen as knowledge rather than wisdom. Science helps us to understand the physical reality around us. It helps us to manage all that reality for our welfare and progress. Without science, mankind would not have conquered the great peaks of excellence. All our skyscrapers and flyovers, submarines and space capsules, smartphones that carry whole universes in them, are gifts of science. Without science, we would have been little better than the savage that descended from the tree and started walking erect on two legs instead of four millennia ago. Science keeps the world moving ahead, at breakneck speed. Science is the lifeblood of progress and development. Yet science fails to satisfy the human soul. The soul does not live by facts alone. The soul need

If your job is your passion, there is no better meaning you can discover in your life. If your job is something you love doing, life is as breezy as a delightful song. For many people, work is a burden from which they need to relax in the evenings with some leisurely activities. Weekend pastimes and annual holiday trips are required for such people to recharge the batteries of their lives. Leisure, hobbies and holidays are all good and required too even for people whose career is their passion. But if such activities are necessitated by the stress of your regular job, then your career cannot offer you the meaning of your life. We live in a world which cannot offer everyone the jobs of their dreams or a profession that suits their genes. We are forced to take up certain jobs out of the sheer necessity of a regular income. However, we can convert that job into something we enjoy doing. Otherwise, life can be a misery; if not for ourselves, for our clients or whoever we are suppo

Maggie [my wife] and a friend at Badrinath In the post-graduate course in psychology I did a decade ago, there were dozens of theories and corresponding practical approaches for dealing with psychological problems. Religion was not mentioned anywhere in those theories or their practical approaches. Yet religion remains the most common refuge of people from their day-to-day trials and tribulations. Millions of people rely on religion for making sense of their life. Moreover, religion has been coeval with homo sapiens. We cannot obviously ignore religion when we discuss people’s search for life’s meaning. My mother was an example of a typical religious believer. Hers was a simple faith which accepted the given dogmas and rituals without a question. The Bible was the ultimate source of truth for her though she never cared to study it systematically. In fact, she knew nothing more of the Bible than what the priests preached from various pulpits. If anyone pointed out the contrad

What did life mean to the millions of people who awaited their death in Hitler’s concentration camps? Any day, not too distant, they could be gassed to death. Their bodies might end up in a corpse factory [ Kadaververwertungsanstalt] that converted human body fat into glycerine and soap. Becoming toilet soap cannot be the meaning of anyone’s life. What did life mean to Hitler himself and his accomplices who ran the camps? Murdering millions of people cannot render anyone’s life meaningful. Hitler saw himself as the saviour of Germany. Eliminating the Jews was part of his messianic mission. The mission was the meaning of life for Hitler. But what about his victims? Viktor Frankl was one of Hitler’s victims. His mother, wife and brother were murdered by the Nazis. Frankl survived the horrors and brutalities of the camps and wrote the celebrated book, Man’s Search for Meaning . Meaning is what makes life bearable even in a concentration camp, even in the face of death. Even suffe

Humility is not in my DNA. I was hopelessly vain until some benevolent people in Shillong decided to hammer my ego on the anvil of humiliation. The Mastermind [the name I gave in my memoir, Autumn Shadows , to the person who masterminded the whole strategy] made me a personification of shame. I became so ashamed of myself, my ego was so much pulverised, that I had to leave the place just out of the survival instinct that keeps organisms keep going even when they know they are worthless in the larger picture that really matters. [Matters to whom? That’s a question I’ll take up in subsequent blogs.] I left Shillong with a fragmented soul. Nearly two decades have passed after that flight and life has taught me a lot of lessons in those decades. Unfortunately humility has not been one of those lessons, it seems. Somebody in one of the many WhatsApp groups to which I belong more by necessity than choice was generous enough to tell me that in that group to which I never wanted to belo