Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Ficition The Covid-19 lockdown in the country had reached the fifth day and the day was drawing sluggishly to an Eliotean twilight that was spread out like a patient etherised upon a surgery desk. Days were horrors now. Eat and sleep, and watch the TV during the intervals. There was nothing else to do. He couldn’t even sleep now. He realised that he was no incarnation of Kumbhakarna or Rip Van Winkle. He was Martin, English teacher at a CBSE school. John and Tom were also feeling equally restless in their own homes which were not far from Martin’s. They used to have weekend flings together over a bottle of McDowell brandy. John had given up his lucrative job as the branch manager of a Dubai firm and taken to tapping rubber in his village. Tom’s furniture shop in the city was closed due to what he called the ‘Coronation of China’. “Hey, there’s a bottle of JD available,” Tom said on phone. “What’s JD?” Martin wondered. “Jack Daniel’s, man. Top class whiskey. Aren’t

Malankara Dam's reservoir [in Kerala, a few km from my house] Kerala is quite different from the other states in India. The difference is not just about literacy or economic development or health infrastructure. There is much else that marks out Kerala as unique. Kerala’s religious demography comes to mind first. According to the 2011 census, 55% of people in Kerala are Hindus, 27% are Muslims and 18% are Christians. Yet Kerala is seen by a lot of Indians as a Christian state if only because the state consistently opposed the kind of communal politics played by the BJP. Even Mr Modi’s histrionics failed to move the Malayali hearts. Mr Modi took his own revenge on the state too. Kerala was hit by severe floods in 2018 and 2019. The Modi government pretended not to see the devastation. Even the state government’s pleas for deserved assistance in a federal system fell on deaf ears. Let alone that, Mr Modi went to the extent of denying the help that came from foreign n

All my friends – with one exception or two – seem to be very God-fearing people. My WhatsApp space is replete with religious messages every time I open it. Some messages are prayers or spiritual messages related to COVID19. Some are warnings and threats issued on behalf of none other than God. Quite a few are prophesies made on the basis of certain scriptural verses or the visions that certain preachers claim to receive from God directly. I rarely open any of these. I opened one this afternoon because it happened to be a very large file, the video of a prolonged speech by a Catholic priest. The speech went on for an hour or so. I listened to half of it. The message that accompanied the video was that the priest was making an accurate prediction about the present happenings and the future of the earth. It turned out that the priest was opposed to all such predictions, miracles and other misuses of religion. So why did the sender of that message mislead people by giving a false intr

My personal library: a view Great thoughts come from great minds. We live in a time that seems to have sacrificed thinking at the altar of expediency. There is too much superficiality around because of lack of thinking on the part of human beings. Our religions have become mere rituals and some of those rituals have degenerated enough to be murderous. Our literature is increasingly becoming cerebral puzzles that at best tickle the brains. What we call culture today is nothing more than a shop-ware peddled thoughtlessly at social media platforms. Thoughtlessness is a serious problem. Thinking has to be brought back to our lives. Perhaps the old masters can help us. That’s what I think. Hence I have taken up the A2Z Challenge thrown by the Blogchatter team. The theme I have chosen for the challenge is ‘Great Books for Great Thoughts’. I intend to present 26 books to you starting from 1 April. We’ll have a sweet look at books from Arms and the Man to Zorba the Greek . W

It was not a bad day at all. I read a lot, gathered my unpublished short stories into an e-book titled Love in the Time of Corona [which will soon be available at Amazon] and ended the day with the usual gardening. I had ordered two books from Amazon which were to be delivered one of these days. My premonition about the lockdown went wrong by a day or two.   Hence my new books are stuck somewhere on the road and I went back to my existing collection and read [reread, rather] The Ugly Duckling by A A Milne, The Jest of Hahalaba by Lord Dunsany, and Cathleen ni Houlihan by W B Yeats. They are all one-act plays and hence short. Then someone sent me a few Malayalam novels via WhatsApp. I read one of them too: Balyakala Sakhi [ Childhood Friend ] by Vaikom Muhamad Basheer. All of these, the English plays as well as the Malayalam novella, belong to the old gen literary tradition. They have the regular plots, familiar settings and palpable joys and sorrows. Even the fairy tal

It's been almost a year since my memoir, Autumn Shadows , was published as an e-book at Amazon . Quite a few people asked me for a print version of the book. It took me a while to get the print version ready. Here it is.  You can order your copies here .  Here is an extract from the book: “Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being,” as Camus wrote. The disquieting ruggedness of my ascents with the Sisyphean rocks through years has not depleted my nostalgia for innocence.   Rather I have rediscovered it in the autumn of my existence on the earth, the only existence that I will ever have.   Like Camus’s quintessential rebel, I have said No to certain systems and realities and Yes to certain others so that my life has acquired a unique meaning for me.   This book is about that meaning and about my journey toward it. I have come a long way from Meursault through Sisyphus to Dr Rieux.   Dr Rieux is the protagonist of Ca

The veranda of an ancient church in Kerala We are essentially vulnerable creatures. All that medical insurance and the elite treatment promised by it may suddenly abandon us on the wayside like unwanted orphans. All that security we built in concrete in the form of walled mansions may mock us. There is apparently no refuge even in religious rituals. There is no escape from certain inescapable frailty. Covid-19 places us face to face with our susceptibility to sudden death. This is the quintessential absurdity of human life to which philosophers like Albert Camus drew our attention again and again. We live as if we are conquering Alexanders or Genghis Khans. There is no end to conquests in our dreams. One conquest urges us on to the next. Even our gods become our tools in the process. We forget the real purpose of our religions and their rituals and use them for personal aggrandisement. Our fellow human beings become our stepping stones to what we perceive as success.