Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated on this day 72 years ago by a man who lacked the brains to understand profundity. The killer, Nathuram Godse, justified his pernicious deed in an eloquent speech in the court. I would like to pick out three of his prominent arguments and show why he was utterly wrong. 1. Folly of non-violence Godse’s first major argument is that the right answer to aggression is violence. “I would consider it a religious and moral duty to resist and, if possible, to overpower such an enemy [who uses force] by use of force.” He went on to argue that mankind is incapable of “scrupulous adherence to these lofty principles [of truth and non-violence] in its normal life from day to day.” Godse obviously failed to understand the very “loftiness” (to use his own term) of the Mahatma’s vision. Gandhi wished to elevate mankind to a higher level of consciousness. Gandhi’s was a messianic vision. He was not fighting merely for liberating India from the British but also

Image from shubhzquotes India is like a vehicle whose driver is always looking into the rear-view mirror. Our leaders and too many citizens are stuck in the past. They are always busy digging up gems from the past. It is nice to belong to a civilisation that has a great history. But to be buried in that history is quite insane. Either we are stuck with the glories of the past or we are picking the errors from the same place. Glories belong to the ancient past and the errors belong to rather recent past: that’s the only difference. The recent past stretches from Nehru and his ‘dynasty’ to the Mughals. While the ancient India knew everything from nuclear physics to the Internet, Nehru and his dynasty were an ignorant and vicious lot that ruined the great civilisation of the past. The degeneration began with the Mughals, of course. Whether the Mughals and his successors committed all the historical blunders is immaterial if progress is what we want. It’s no use looking back a

India has got a miserable 140 th place out of 156 nations surveyed by the World Happiness Report  for happiness levels. Finland continues to hold number one position, followed by Denmark, Norway and Iceland. The survey concludes that generosity and an environment which sustains mutual support keep people happy. The USA has the world’s highest GDP, the richest nation, but its rank in the happiness index is 19. Wealth doesn’t necessarily keep you happy. Happiness is a feeling created by people’s willingness to be of help to one another. The government plays a vital role too. People alone cannot determine the prevalent mood in the country. The Happiness Report suggests that countries which improve civic engagement by making their government more representative will be happier. India now has a government that has been promising us better days for about six years now. But the Report shows that we have dropped way behind Pakistan, China, Bhutan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and even Bangla

Love is a kaleidoscopic phenomenon. It has infinite hues which can form endless permutations and combinations. Admiration can turn into romantic love which can change into murderous love as it happens in the case of Othello and Desdemona. “She loved me for the dangers I had passed,” says Othello, “And I loved her that she did pity them.” Their love transcended their races. It offended quite a lot of people. But theirs was genuine love, a love that went out of oneself to the other, a love that embraced the other in an elevated realm. Such love makes the lovers grow further as individuals. But there’s always an Iago hiding somewhere just like the serpent in the primeval Eden. Othello is a soldier by profession. The soldier in him militates against the lover in him because of the games that Iago plays with him. If he was more romantic than belligerent he would have probed more into the allegations against his wife. But that precisely is one of the most difficult problems of love:

You won’t find too many women in the Northeast wearing sari. The tribal people have their own traditional dresses and they wear them. They look elegant in those dresses. Those are dresses they designed for their convenience. Those are dresses that add a unique charm to the people. The diversity of dresses in the northeast may astound you. There are over 220 ethnic groups in that one region of India alone and an equal number of dialects. All these groups have their own dresses, cuisines, festivals, and cultures. When I started my career as a teacher in Shillong in 1986, I used to have Khasi tribal food for my lunch from a small and only restaurant near my school. It was not easy to like the bland dishes with almost no spices in them. But soon I did grow to like them so much that I thought they were better than my own traditional foods. One thing was certain anyway: they were far better than the foods I cooked myself for breakfast and dinner. My culinary skills have not improved

Book Review Title: The RSS: A Menace to India Author: A G Noorani Publisher: LeftWord Books, Delhi, 2019 Pages: 547 India is passing through a painful phase, arguably the most challenging one in its post-Independence history. The nation’s very fabric is under threat of being ripped apart. It may no longer be what the Preamble to its Constitution claims: a secular republic among other things. India has one of the best Constitutions according to many experts. That Constitution is likely to be dumped soon. Slowly and not so clandestinely, many of its principles are being undermined by the present dispensation. That dispensation is controlled by an organisation which dons a cultural garment: the RSS. What is the RSS? Whose culture does it seek to uphold? Why does it claim to be a charitable organisation when it comes to paying the income tax? Why does it harbour so much hatred in its subterranean layers? How did it come to accrue so much political clout recently? A

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