Tomichan Matheikal's blog

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. If turnips were watches, I'd wear one by my side. If "if's" and "and's" were pots and pans, There'd be no work for tinkers' hands. Wishes belong frightfully to nursery rhymes. The rhymist knows that wishes are granted only in fairy tales. Real life is about turnips and heartburns.  When I was young, I longed to be a writer. Not an ordinary one. A great writer. Another Shakespeare. Or a Bernard Shaw, at least. Life mocked at that and taught me great lessons and my wishes fell by the wayside and died with subdued whimpers. For some reason that's beyond my understanding, I never had simple wishes like good people. For example, the wish to become a doctor or an engineer never crossed the threshold of my ambition's horizon. The career which I pursued and has continued all my life descended on me rather accidentally, quite like a wayward meteor hitting an unsuspecting planet. I'm comp

Blood is the inevitable price you pay to earn your place in your country. The narrator's grandmother in Amitav Ghosh's novel, The Shadow Lines , says that. Maybe you don't pay it yourself, your parents or grandparents or their uncles did. People draw their national borders with blood. That bloodshed is a religion for people.  India seems to be getting ready for another national sacrifice. If the freedom fighters of yesteryears paid that price for all Indians, today's nationalists are doing it in order to snatch the country from certain religious communities. "India belongs to Indians" was the old slogan. The new one is, "India belongs to Hindus." It's about territory anyway. This territory belongs to me and people I consider mine. Like the beasts in the forests, we mark out our frontiers. This is my den, keep out or else you're doomed. Nationalist slogans bear the tang of the wild growls in primitive enclosures.  National borders are s

A mosque under siege in Delhi If you sow the wind, you will reap the whirlwind. This is what Delhi is doing now. This has happened elsewhere too. Gujarat 2002 is a glaring example. The people who masterminded the riots then are in power now in Delhi. We know what their intentions are. We can’t expect them to work out solutions. When the leaders of a country don’t want solutions, the situation is catastrophic. Catastrophe is what awaits the nation. If you watch the videos that appear on the social media now, you will undoubtedly notice one thing: the hatred in the eyes of the perpetrators of violence. Hatred is what has driven our prominent leaders ever since they entered politics. Hatred can never do good to anyone, let alone a nation. So what’s the solution? We, the people, are the only solution. If we decide not to be fooled by the jargon that our leaders and their mindless followers dish out, if we decide to be sane and rational, if we opt for peace and development, the

Fiction When Sumit put up one of his old snaps on his Facebook timeline, he was only relishing nostalgia for a moment. Or maybe, he wanted a few likes from his virtual friends. Political writing was ignored by people these days like the plague. Politics in the  country had become kind of plague.  He tagged David to the pic. In fact, David had clicked that photo and Sumit wanted to give him the credit. Or maybe, Sumit wanted at least one person, the tagged one, to take note of the pic.  David was too quick to distance himself from the   tag .  "Did I click that picture? I don't remember. I was never so close to you," he texted in Whatsapp.  "Don't you remember?" Sumit asked in disbelief. How can he forget it? It was the day when Sharmila Chakraborty, their classmate, had spent a whole day in David's rented room whose door remained closed all the while they were together.  Sumit and David lived in nearby rooms both of which were rented from one

The latest statue in India Image from Orissa Diary “True religion is not talk, or doctrines, or theories, nor is it sectarianism. It is the relation between soul and God. Religion does not consist in erecting temples, or building churches, or attending public worship. It is not to be found in books, or in words, or in lectures, or in organizations. Religion consists in realization. We must realize God, feel God, see God, talk to God. That is religion. ” Swami Vivekananda said that long ago. Sectarianism was a virus that ate into the Indian psyche in those days too. We choose to call it communalism. Communalism is the wrong word. The word ‘communal’ does not have a negative meaning in English except in India. What Indians mean by the word is actually ‘sectarian’, dividing people into factions, while ‘communal’ is about sharing and caring among members of a community. “Class divide, Chauvinism, Social media validation, Alarming increase of criminals in politics, Lack of civi

Book Review “Do you love me, Mayya?” Abdallah asks his wife. “She was startled.... She said nothing and then she laughed. She laughed out loud, and the tone of it irritated me.” Mayya thinks that such words as love belong to TV shows. In real life, no one talks about love. Abdallah remembers that on their wedding day Mayya had not laughed. She did not even smile. Mayya didn’t want to marry Abdallah. Ali was her man. Ali had returned from London though without securing a diploma. The diploma didn’t matter really, London mattered. Mayya wanted to escape from her village and go and live in the city of Muscat. Ali was a symbol of that aspiration. Eventually she names her daughter London. She will have her London one way or another in spite of the fact that she belongs to a patriarchal Islamic system. Most of the characters of Jokha Alharthi’s novel, Celestial Bodies , which won the Man Booker International Prize 2019, belong to rural Oman. Love is their quintessential longing

Fiction “How can a Muslim elephant enter a Hindu temple?” Surendran fulminated. An elephant named Ibrahim Koya was part of the parade of elephants that was held as a traditional part of the temple festival. Ibrahim Koya belonged to Mohamad Koya who had named the elephant after one of his legendary ancestors who was said to have brought to control a mammoth tusker that was in heat just by standing in front of it and holding its trunk with one of his hands. The other hand gestured to the elephant to kneel down obediently. The elephant in heat obeyed very faithfully. Mohamad Koya bought an elephant in honour of that legendary ancestor and named it after him too. “What’s wrong with this fellow?” Murali wondered to Sukumaran. Yesterday only the three of them were sitting in the restaurant eating paratha with beef roast. How did Surendran become such a fervent Hindu today? “Maybe, he wants to become the Governor of Mizoram or something,” said Sukumaran. Surendran had joined th