Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Illustration from 123Greetings Simple things can give me heights of joy. Small things can move me to depths of grief too. A draught of whisky with a fistful of cashew nuts can drive me crazy enough to hum a romantic song. A good book can enthral me till its last page. The little girl waiting at the door of her classroom in the morning with a smile and a greeting fills my heart with a vigour that sustains me for a long time of the day. Life is full of small delights. Life is full of bigger disappointments. The small delights are life’s compensations for the big disappointments. Can joys surpass sorrows in human life? My experience doesn’t vouch for an affirmative answer. One of the questions that someone raised rather casually and that gripped my fancy for quite a while was: Did Jesus ever smile? Later on, I replaced Jesus in that question with the Buddha and many others of the religious-saintly type. I could never imagine a smiling face of any of those religious personal

Image from Pinterest  I mistook you for a black sheep Whereas you were just a helplessly lost sheep Caught amidst the naked thorns Of mangled brambles and briars In the desert with no oasis in sight  You bleated your heart out,  And no one heard you.  No one wanted to hear, perhaps.  Perhaps, your cries were smothered  By the defeaning slogans of furious men Whose hearts are stuffed with fossils,  Whose tongues are forked with biting words,  Whose breath carries the fumes of savage slogans.  Let me release you from this thorny mess.  Sit beside me for as long as you can.  We'll heal each other's wounds.  I'm as wounded as you are.  We are both victims of the same system.  I'm lost too.  Though they call me a black sheep.  Come, sit here, by my side.  Touch me.  Your pain will heal me.  Let mine heal you too. 

Fiction Tony left. There were only four members in the WhatsApp group. When Tony left, the group became 25% less. Less than what? 3/3 is 100%. Vijay texted. Isn’t it now ¾? Andrew asked. What the hell is happening to Dirty Saints? Husain wondered after a long silence and never wrote anything more in the group. Tony, Vijay, Andrew and Husain were the Dirty Saints, the renowned clique in the senior secondary school. After school, they all went their own ways. Tony took up computer engineering and joined Infosys, Vijay opted for medicine and became a doc, Andrew pursued literature and teaches at a university, and Husain joined his father’s business after graduating in commerce. Tony was showing signs of frustration from the time Narendra Modi was elected the Prime Minister for the second term. His posts in the group became increasingly vitriolic against the ruling party at the Centre and its blatant communalism. Ur Congy was the communal party, man. Vijay texted in

Faces of chicanery History belongs to the dead. History resurrects the dead from their graves again and again. With love sometimes and with vengeance more often. See how the present dispensation in India keeps resurrecting Jawaharlal Nehru and a few others with vengeance. The same dispensation goes out of the way to give a new history to Nathuram Godse and a few others. How will this dispensation be remembered when its time runs out sooner or later? Ashoka died 2250 years ago. History still recalls him as a great ruler who learnt some of the profoundest lessons of life from a huge mistake. His territorial ambitions cost more than 100,000 deaths and 150,000 deportations. His ambition melted in the furnace of the grief that he had set on flame. He learnt great lessons like “Dharma (means) having few faults and many good deeds, mercy, charity, truthfulness and purity” [Major Pillar Edict No 2]. Very few conquerors learn lessons like Ashoka. Conquerors are usually blind, blind

One of the favourite songs of my youth was ‘ Take me home country roads ’ by John Denver. I was a denizen of Shillong in those days. Shillong had uncanny knack for making people feel out of place. The place made me feel like a second-class citizen all through the 15 years of my subsistence there. [One of the chapters of my memoirs, Autumn Shadows , has that title: ‘Second-class citizen’.] It’s only natural that I yearned for a better place, one that made me feel at home. Why didn’t I leave the place sooner than I did? That is one of the mysteries of life. Destiny. Probably, I was scared of venturing out to a new place. Probably, I lacked the confidence that I would find a good job elsewhere. When I left Shillong finally, it was more out of a compulsion than my choice. I was ejected, so to say. I spent the next decade and a half in Delhi, the place which I didn’t want to leave until my retirement. I liked Delhi for various reasons. It left you alone, for one. Delhi was the leas

Book Review “Nothing cripples a human being more than unrequited love,” says the narrator of An Orchestra of Minorities , the new novel from Chigozie Obioma. Unrequited love is the central theme of the novel. Chinonso, the protagonist, is “a small, lonely man whose only sin [is] that he was hungry for companionship.” Chinonso is a young chicken-farmer in a village in Nigeria. One night, as he is returning home with a few new chickens, he saves a young woman named Ndali from suicide. Ndali was ditched by the man whom she loved very much and helped to study. “Nothing, nothing should make someone fall inside the river and die. Nothing.” That’s what Chinonso tells Ndali. He meets Ndali again some time later at a petrol pump. Eventually they fall in love. But Ndali is the daughter of a chief who lives in a palatial house. Ndali and her family belong to an entirely different social and economic class. Her father and brother oppose her affair with Chinonso. They insult him afte

Image from jasonwahler.com A prayer that has fascinated me for decades is Dr Rheinhold Neibuhr’s Serenity Prayer that Alcoholics Anonymous teaches its members. I came across this prayer in late 1970s and it has remained in my heart until today. I don’t claim I have attained the serenity that the prayer offers. I have learnt to accept the things I cannot change. I keep changing the things I can. I hope I know the difference between what can be changed and what can’t. I don’t much seek to change the external reality. There’s very little that I can do about that. I’m just an ordinary mortal in a very complex and complicated country that is governed by people who are too powerful for anyone to influence. I wish I could change a lot of things around me. If God appeared and gave me a boon to change what I wanted, my list would be quite endless. But I know that even God is helpless in this regard. Does God weep over what people do in His name? Well, I don’t believe in any anthr