Tomichan Matheikal's blog

The book that I’m reading now is An Orchestra of Minorities , the new novel by the Nigerian writer Chigozie Obioma. The eponymous orchestra does not refer to any musical composition; it refers to a lament. This orchestra is a collective lament by a brood of chickens produced when they lose one of them to a hawk. When the hawk carries away one of the chickens, the others produce the same sound together, “like a burial song for the one that has gone.” The protagonist’s father calls that lament an orchestra of the minorities. The chickens belong to the minority of birds that are “fragile” and “very unlike the wild birds”. These days India is witnessing a lot of orchestras of minorities, protests against the apparently ill-motivated Citizenship Act. The country’s extraordinarily powerful leaders keep telling us that the Act is good for the country. But millions of citizens refuse to trust them. Trust cannot be extracted through barrels of guns. A few days back, on 23 Dec to be p

Movies and life are mirror images of each other. Movies reflect life and vice-versa. Script writers draw inspiration from the life around them. Movie viewers are influenced to some extent at least by what they see on the screen. Audrey Hepburn went to the extent of claiming that “Everything I learnt I learnt from the movies.” Movies do influence people. But can we ascribe to movies all the violence and other forms of evil in today’s world? A fellow blogger raises the question in this week’s Indispire: “ Is the portrayal of women in Cinema one of the reasons behind increase in sexual crimes against them? Do commercial movies merely reflect prevailing attitudes or do they shape and contribute to those attitudes as well?”  Did our ancestors burn thousands of women on the funeral pyres of their husbands because of movies? Were millions of women kept confined to hearth and home for centuries because of movies? Were thousands of pubescent girls abandoned in temples in the name of

If I had abided by all my new year resolutions, I would have been a saint by now. I stopped making new year resolutions when I realised that none of my resolutions met any fulfilment beyond a couple of days or utmost a week. But as I’m entering the year which will make me a sexagenarian – a senior citizen – resolutions began to queue up at the threshold of my heart. I made rendezvous with each of them and resolved to choose two. One being a very personal affair, it won’t find a mention here. The other is about my writing. Your writing offends too many people, the resolution-candidate said. Moreover, nothing much is achieved by pointing out people’s errors to them. Turn positive. Okay, I say. I shall enter the last phase of a man’s dharma: sannyasa. I hereby renounce all cravings for a better government, a better nation and a better life. No, you don’t have to renounce anything yet. Death will demand such renunciation in due course of time. The mention of death diverts

Book Review Arundhati Roy is a rare blend of passion and intellect. Even the most banal truths become poetry in her writing and go straight to your heart. I love such writing. Such writing has immense dangers, however. It is emotive and many people – too many, in fact – are not able to deal with emotions effectively. That is precisely why Roy has too many enemies. That’s not the only reason, however. She doesn’t belong where most people do: a religious faction, a political party or leaning, or any other narrow-minded social entity. She belongs to the cosmos. She towers far above the ordinary mortals that refuse to see beyond painfully bounded horizons. She sees reality differently from her vantage point. My Seditious Heart is a collection of the essays and articles she wrote in the last two decades for various periodicals or publications. They are brought together into an elegant volume of nearly 1000 pages by Penguin Random House. I had read most of these writings when

Book Review Anyone who is familiar with the Catholic Church will agree that a Reformation is long overdue in it. Too many things are going wrong in it. It is not anything like what Jesus would approve of. The book, Karthavinte Namathil (In the Lord’s Name ), is written by a Catholic nun who is facing defrocking because she has questioned too many of the Church’s sins of commission and omission. The author’s chief complaint is that the nuns are dominated by the priests. Some of them (too many of them, if this book is to be believed) are sexually exploited by the priests too. A nun’s life turns out to be service of the priests in various ways instead of service of the Lord and His people. The author argues for liberation of the nuns from the clutches of priests. She goes a step ahead and demands more personal liberty for the nuns. I am quite familiar with a lot of priests and nuns and the religious life itself. I was part of the religious system for ten years. In my experien

Jawaharlal Nehru gave India a slightly different version of secularism from what the west practises. Nehru’s secularism not only dissociated politics from religion but also gave full freedom to all religions. In other words, while the west sought to discredit religion altogether, Nehru accepted religions and let them be. But religion should not be a matter of any importance for the government as long as it does not pose any threat to peace, to law and order. Nehru was not a believer. He was of the opinion that religion prevented the intellect from developing. The religious approach is dogmatic and authoritative. Such approach will breed superstition, bigotry and intolerance. That was Nehru’s view. But he also knew that the majority of Indians would not understand his enlightened view. So he let religions be. Religion is an infantile need, as psychologist Freud said. Like children needing the constant care of parents, the religious believer seeks god’s protection all the ti

Sir Troglodyte A few thousand years ago, a couple of crooks sat down in a cave and divided people into four groups: Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and Shudras. The crooks placed themselves, their clans who lived in similar caves and their chamchas who lived in lesser caves in the group which they declared as superior to the others who did not have the fortune of owning caves. Even the king and his satellites were subordinated to this superior group because the crooks had invented a fantastic creature called God to supervise all these arrangements. Then they created about 4000 castes and subcastes. Not contented with all those divisions, the divine crooks [they had ascribed divinity to themselves in the process] put a whole lot of people outside these groups. The Ati-Shudras were subhuman people, according to the crooks’ divine revelations. The Ati-Shudras were again divided: Untouchables, Unseeables and Unapproachables. The divine crooks decided who would marry whom, who w