Tomichan Matheikal's blog

“Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another).” In fact, the Bible in the wrong hand can be diabolic. You can claim to own all the truths while drowning in a deluge of lies and forgeries. Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird teaches us that and many other great lessons of life. “It is a sin to kill a mockingbird,” says the novel. Mockingbirds are innocent and harmless. Innocence should be preserved, not destroyed. Yet goodness is always under threat from evil in the human world. This is what the novel shows. Tom Robinson is a black American in Maycomb. He is accused of raping Mayella, daughter of Bob Ewell who is nothing more than a drunkard with too many children. Actually Mayella asked Tom into the house under the pretext of helping with some repair. When she tried to seduce him, Bob Ewell entered and he beat up his daughter for what she did. He then accused Tom of molesting Mayella. Because Bob was white and To

Every spiritual quest is ultimately a quest for meaning. Most people are contented with readymade meanings provided by religions because personal quests are arduous and even hazardous. Religions and other readymade meanings fail to make sense to some people and such people have to undertake the torturous path themselves. Herman Hesse’s novel, Siddhartha , tells the story of one such quest. Siddhartha is a young Brahmin of ancient India who is not contented with the truths and meanings given by his religion. He happens to listen to the Samanas (wandering ascetics) and chooses to join them. His friend Govinda too joins him. From the ascetics he learns to liberate the self from its traditional trappings like family, property and sensuality. But Siddhartha is still discontented. Self-denial is not enlightenment , he learns. Both Siddhartha and his friend Govinda leave the ascetics after they listen to Gotama Buddha’s teachings about the Eightfold Path for enlightenment. The

A warning before we start: Albert Camus’s The Rebel is not a work of fiction; it is a philosophical essay, the first of its kind that I am bringing in this series. Let me make a confession too: Camus is the only author who found a second place in this A2Z series. It is not only because of my admiration for the author but also because I couldn’t get a good novel whose title starts with the letter R. And a disclaimer: This book will put off readers who are not interested in philosophical and literary themes as well as style. A rebel is a person who says ‘No’ to the prevailing situation or system. But that would be mere teenage rebellion. Camus’s rebel is a person who simultaneously says a loud ‘Yes’ to his personal set of values with which he would replace what he doesn’t want to accept. Rebellion is not a negation, in other words. It is an affirmation of your own values which you know will promote the welfare of the human race. Rebellion is an act of forging a better soc

Jules David, ‘Don Quixote and Sancho Panza’, 1887.   Wikimedia Commons Quixote – or Don Quixote , to be precise – is too classical to need an introduction or summary. Having read too many farfetched stories about chivalrous knights, a middle-aged and rather loony Alonso Quixano decides that he is a knight, Don Quixote de La Mancha. He gets himself a miserable steed and a squire, Sancho Panza, imagines a peasant woman as his beautiful lady Dulcinea, and embarks on a protracted adventure to save the world from all sorts of evils and monsters. He will finally be brought home by friends and neighbours as a broken and exhausted soul and will wake up from a deep slumber to the plain reality of his sombre mediocre existence – too tired to live it, however. Quixote lives under a gargantuan delusion. He imagines himself as the saviour of the world. What he does, however, turns out to be either foolish or wicked. He can fight with windmills assuming that they are monsters or de

When the world today is struggling with the pandemic of Covid-19, Albert Camus’s novel The Plague can offer some stimulating lessons. When a plague breaks out in the city of Oran, initially the political authorities fail to deal with it as a serious problem. The ordinary people also don’t view it as an epidemic that requires public action rather than as individual annoyances. The people of Oran are obsessed with their personal sufferings and inconveniences. Finally the authorities are forced to put Oran in quarantine. Father Paneloux, a Jesuit priest, delivers a sermon declaring the epidemic as God’s punishment for Oran’s sins. Months of suffering make people rise above their selfish notions and obsessions and join anti-plague efforts being carried out by people like Dr Rieux. Dr Rieux is an atheist but committed to service of humanity. He questions Father Paneloux’s religious views when a small boy is killed by the epidemic. The priest delivers another sermon on the necess

Kill or be killed is one of the fundamental natural laws among animals. Life is tough in such a world and calls for certain qualities such as determination and endurance. Ernest Hemingway’s short novel, The Old Man and the Sea , is a tribute to determination and endurance. Santiago is an aged fisherman. Of late he is beset with misfortune. Eighty-four days have gone by since he caught his last fish. The people around him are now convinced that he is hopelessly down on his luck so much so that even the boy Manolin, Santiago’s apprentice, is asked to stay away from the old man. Manolin continues to do some chores for Santiago but stops accompanying him to the sea. On the 85 th day, Santiago sails beyond the charted waters and hooks a huge marlin in the deep sea. The fish is too huge for him to manage and so he lets it drag the boat initially. Both Santiago and the fish know that they have to kill or be killed. Who will kill whom is the only question that remains. On t

Hell is other people. This is one of the most quoted sentences of Jean-Paul Sartre, French novelist and philosopher. No Exit is one of his short plays which ends with that sighing realisation: Hell is other people. Three people arrive in hell after death: Garcin, Inez and Estelle. Garcin and Estelle pretend that they were condemned to perdition by mistake or unjustly. Inez is honest enough to admit that she was “a damned bitch” who had a homosexual affair with her cousin’s wife Florence. The cousin chose to kill himself under a tram and Florence turned on the gas killing herself and Inez. Garcin is forced to admit that he was not the hero he pretended to be. He was a deserter in the time of war. Moreover he had been treating his wife abominably. He reached home night after night “stinking of wine and women”. Estelle was from a poor family and hence accepted marriage with a man who was three times older than her but was rich. She had an affair with a young man with w