Tomichan Matheikal's blog

The self-proclaimed Veer The BJP leadership seems to be determined to confer a posthumous Bharat Ratna on V.D. [no pun intended] Savarkar, if not elevate him as an interim Rashtra Pita while the original Pita is being assassinated again and again by the currently fashionable febrile nationalism. Was he indeed a Veer or a Bheeru? Who conferred the title of Veer on a man who tendered four apologies one after another to the British colonial oppressors and two to the Indian government? India is determined to rewrite its history. Amit Shah has articulated that intent too clearly. Narendra Modi is shrewd enough to play it safer. In the original history, it is Savarkar who wanted to divide India along communal lines before even the atheistic Mohammad Ali Jinnah put on the robe of the Muslim Messiah.   Interestingly, Savarkar was an atheist too. Savarkar propounded the two-nation theory in 1923 in his essay on Hindutva and later, in 1937, elaborated on it in his presidential addre

Jolly before her arrest A serial killer named Jolly took the state of Kerala by storm ever since the police took her into custody a few days ago. She had fooled too many people for a decade and a half during which she killed at least six persons including a little child. She pretended to be a lecturer at NIT Calicut when in reality she had not even completed her undergraduate studies. She was apparently a very devout practitioner of religion in her parish. People regarded her as an exemplary woman in many ways. How can someone fool so many people for so long? Obviously the social, electronic and print media in Kerala celebrated Jolly in predictable ways. There have been endless TV debates on her, newspaper articles, and relentless posts on the social media. The jokes and trolls that descended like incessant bombardment on the social media revealed the average Malayali’s taste for the insipid as well as his latent cynicism. The Catholic Church in Kerala was too quick to

In a lecture delivered at the closing rally of the World Social Forum in Brazil in 2003, Arundhati Roy said, “The two arms of the Indian government have evolved the perfect pincer action. While one arm is busy selling India off in chunks, the other, to divert attention, is orchestrating a howling, baying chorus of Hindu nationalism and religious fascism. It is conducting nuclear tests, rewriting history books, burning churches, and demolishing mosques. Censorship, surveillance, the suspension of civil liberties and human rights, the questioning of who is an Indian citizen and who is not, particularly with regard to religious minorities, are all becoming common practice now.” Vajpayee was the prime minister then. He was quite benign in comparison with his successor who strutted up the Rajpath a decade later. Today, that successor has almost sold the entire country to his cronies. The sales are going on. And nationalism is also marching royally all over the country with quixotic

Socrates accepts the poison Image from masshumanities Today [10 Oct] is the world mental health day. Who is mentally healthy and who is not? It’s not very easy to determine anyone’s sanity. Men and women who were considered insane by significant numbers of people eventually turned out to be geniuses or saints or something similarly eminent. Mahatma Gandhi’s thoughts and views were quite insane by the world’s normal standards. Joan of Arc was considered an insane woman and bunt at the stake for her alleged collusion with the devil before being canonised as a saint by the same Church that burnt her as a witch. Geniuses and saints are insane by the world’s average standards. Psychologist-philosopher William James wrote candidly that religious experiences can have “morbid origins” in brain pathology. Religious experiences are often irrational but nevertheless are largely positive by their outcomes. Geniuses are initially perceived by people as lunatics. A genius sees reality d

Social media has become a powerful tool today in the hands of ordinary people. It gives opportunities to anyone to propagate whatever he wants. As a result, a lot of falsehood gets peddled as truths, reputations are more marred than made, and relationships may be ruptured. I happened to watch a new Malayalam movie today on the theme of the menace of social media. I went to watch another movie in fact, but its timing didn’t suit me and hence I bought tickets for Vikruthi , Mischief. The plot is based on a real incident that took place in Kochi recently. A man named Eldho who has a speech impairment suddenly finds himself in the centre of a whirlpool because of a picture of his that was taken while utter weariness had made him fall asleep lying supine on a row of empty seats in the Kochi Metro train. Eldho had spent the whole night in the hospital where his daughter was being treated in the Intensive Care Unit for pneumonia. But the social media picture lampooned him as a drun

Book Review Robert Greene’s best-selling book, The 48 Laws of Power , fascinated me no end when I read it about two decades ago. I found the book in the capacious library of the erstwhile Sawan Public School, Delhi. Greene struck me as a ruthlessly pragmatic person who knew exactly what he was dealing with. I was never interested in power, but the book taught me all I wanted to know how people acquire power and how power works. Greene brings us real examples, and a whole of lot of them from all over history, to teach us the intricacies of power. When I stumbled on another book of his, Mastery , I ordered it without a second thought. The book is sheer delight. Once again, Greene gives us the lessons of mastery through real examples. We meet in this book Leonardo da Vinci and Albert Einstein, Henry Ford and V S Ramachandran, and a score of other persons who were masters in their fields. We learn profound lessons from these masters. Each one of us is unique and has a unique r

The Taj Mahal is more a monument to romance than a mausoleum of royalty. What is life without romance? Romance makes life worth living. Romance adds colours to dark clouds. Clouds without colours are like religious preachers without eloquence. I visited the Taj for the first time before my hairs turned grey. Romance had not died in my heart in spite of the religious people around me with Modieqsue eloquence. It was the winter of 2000, almost four centuries after Shah Jahan planted his first kiss on the ruby lips of Mumtaz. The sweetness of the first kiss determines the lifespan of the wedlock. Kiss is a lock that needs no key. The Taj beckoned me again and again. I don’t think it was the architecture that lured me. I am no architect. Buildings don’t fascinate me. Poetry enchants me. The Taj is a poem. The Taj is the kiss of the infinite lover on eternity.   The poem of my life ten years after the photo above PS. Written for IndiSpire Edition 294: #Heritage .