Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Kerala, where I now live, has three seasons: hot, hotter and hottest. I don’t miss winter anyway, not much at least. I spent my entire youth in Shillong where the winter really chilled people. And winter stretched from October to March, half the year. I detested the cold and yet never thought of leaving the place until the place chucked me out. That’s called destiny. I never believed in destiny until Shillong’s variegated chills taught lessons the hardest way possible. There’s the chill that the mountains hurl at you mercilessly. Then there’s the chill that the mountain people send down your spine. I had enough of both. My middle age was spent in Delhi where the winter was far more desirable if only because the summer was starkly unbearable. Delhi’s winters did not chill me much, anyway. The smog was a menace; the chill was a welcome contrast to the summer’s hell. Now there’s no winter. Right now, at 7 pm in the latter half of December, I sit under a fan after my evening sho

I live in a village in Kerala. When I chose to settle down here over four years ago, my house was constructed by Bengali labourers. Kerala has more than 30 lakh labourers from other states. Quite a lot of them are Bengalis. If you ask them where they are from, they will invariably answer “Kolkata”. Perhaps they are from Bangladesh. In an excellent article in today’s Time of India , Aakar Patel says that you will find Bangladeshis all over the world. “You can go all the way across Italy from Palermo to Venice speaking only Bangla,” he says. Bangladeshis dominate ‘Indian’ restaurants in England, he goes on. The article titled ‘ Akhand Bharat enthusiasts should rewind to Partition ’ deserves to be read by every Indian, especially those who support the new Citizenship Act. The Citizenship Act seeks to divide India further along religious lines. Anyone can easily see that it is particularly anti-Muslim. The BJP and its allies have always hated the Muslims. Their ideology seems to

The hunted and the hunter: they are friends today! The clean chit given to Narendra Modi by the Justice Nanavati Mehta Inquiry Commission does not surprise anyone in India. India is a country of clean chits. Some samples below. When the post-Godhra riots were  burning Modi’s state in 2002, about seventy Muslims fled in two vans from the village Kiliad on 2 March. Hindutva mobs attired in saffron robes and khaki shorts pursued the vans and killed all the fugitives. Nine men were arrested eventually for the crimes. All of them were given clean chits by Gujarat’s judiciary on 11 Oct 2002. Seven months is pretty fast for any Indian court to arrive at a verdict. In the same month of October 2002, twenty-one men implicated in the killing of 40 Muslims in Pandarwada during the same riots were given clean chits in two different cases. Yet another instance of rapid judicial action. One of these men who got the clean chit, Kalubhai Maliwad, was given the BJP ticket in the Gujarat

Prime Minister Vajpayee visited Gujarat in April 2002, two months after the historic riots in the state. Maulvi Hussain Ibrahim Umarji submitted a representation to the PM on the persecution of Muslims in Gujarat. "Give me details," the PM demanded. "He'd know better," replied the Maulvi pointing at Chief Minister Modi. Within days the Maulvi was arrested on charges of terrorism and arson.  Siddharth Varadarajan's book, Gujarat: The Making of a Tragedy, presents   Umarji as a man who condemned the Godhra incident and participated in peace meetings. But Gujarat's judiciary cast him in jail where he languished for eight years. In 2013, less than two years after his acquittal, at the age of 65, the Maulvi breathed his last.  Mohammad   Hussain Kalota was the president of Godhra municipality when the train was burned at the nearby railway station. He helped to bring the situation under control by coordinating with Bhargava, the police chief, helping th

US Commission for International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) has demanded sanctions against our very own Uncle Roly-Poly for getting the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB) passed with visible vitriol and palpable venom. How dare Uncle Sam do this to our hero of heroes, heartthrob of nationalists, encounter specialist?  USCIRF and Uncle Sam have no idea how Uncle Roly-Poly is where he is now. 1.3 billion Indians (our Emperor would put the figure at 7 billion) elected him to power after he had proven his merits over Babur and Aurangzeb, General Dyer and Herr Hitler through mass murders and encounter killings.  And strategies that give Chanakya and Machiavelli a run for their money. Strategies like partition of Kashmir and creation of the Ayodhya Temple.  He will soon give us spiritual orgasm with the creation of one nation with one religion. Aawwww! What an ecstatic country will that be with oneness everywhere! Advaita. Aham Brahmasmi. Tatvam Asi. Osho's orgasm of egolessness. 

In the autumn of 2004, I made my first trek in the Garhwal Himalayas along with a group of students. Hemkund at a height of 4600 metres was our destination. We started our trek from Govind Ghat on a fine morning with a lot of enthusiasm and excitement. It was a two-day trek with a stopover at Ghangaria. We took in the mesmerising charms of the Himalayas as we plodded on the weary way. In the afternoon of the first day, a few hundred metres down Ghangaria, we were stunned by something that was just incredible. A whole mountain of plastic bottles and plastic waste lay in the course of the Laxman Ganga. Starting off from Govind Ghat, Maggie and I Most of the trekkers were pilgrims, people who went to pray at the Gurudwara atop the peak after taking a holy dip in the icy lake. What kind of spirituality is it that failed to teach people a basic respect for the planet? We have so many beautiful slogans which are going to save everything from the rivers to the mountains, the plan

A teacher narrated her woe to me today. There are two girls in her class who belong to a particular religion and wear the headgear that the religion has draped them with. They now wish to participate in a dance that the class is putting up for a function. The girls offered themselves for the dance and the teacher was in a dilemma. She had a bad experience when she asked the girls to remove their headgear for a particular programme in which all participating girls had to wear the same uniform dress. The girls not only refused to do what the teacher asked but also brought their parents the next morning to squabble about their religious rights and privileges. “How do I convince them either to wear the dress required for the dance which implies they remove their headgear or to stay away from the dance?” The teacher asked me. I was helpless. The country has become so viciously communalised that it is impossible to convince people that their religion is not their headgear or some