Tomichan Matheikal's blog

[Note: Since I couldn’t find an appropriate book whose title starts with the letter Y for this A2Z series, I have chosen an author for this chapter. Harari’s name is more popular than the names of his books anyway.] Today there is only one species of humans left on the earth: homo sapiens. The sapiens are a deadly species, according to Yuval Noah Harari’s acclaimed book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind . It is a book of consequential reflections rather than academic history. It can jolt us out of our complacencies. And we need all those jolts. Humans evolved in East Africa some 2.5 million years ago. That is a rather short period of time compared to the lifespan of the universe: 13.5 billion years. There were many species of human beings up to about 10,000 years ago. But the one species of homo sapiens exterminated all the others slowly over many centuries. We, the homo sapiens, are a terrible breed. We have caused the extinction of thousands and thousands of speci

X is the surname that Malcolm gave himself when he shed his old self in order to be a dignified human being. The Autobiography of Malcolm X is the story of that conversion and what happened eventually. Malcolm Little was an African American born in 1925 in Nebraska. His father, a Baptist preacher, was killed by the Ku Klux Klan and his mother was sent unjustly to a mental hospital when he was still a boy. Malcolm grew up in a detention home till eighth grade after which he moved to Boston to live with a foster family. Discrimination and ridicule from the white majority drive him out of school to the streets of Boston where he learns more evil things than good such as gambling, drinking, and doing drugs. He becomes a go-between for black pimps and their white clients and begins to date Sophia, a white woman older than him. He abandons his girlfriend Laura for the sake of Sophia and Laura is driven to prostitution. He tries many jobs such as washing dishes on a train and

Wuthering Heights is so full of violent passions that it is hard to imagine a nineteenth-century young woman as its author. Emily Bronte died in 1848 at the age of 30. She was a shy and reclusive woman without any friends. Yet she created two of the most ruthlessly passionate characters in the whole literature ever: Heathcliff and Catherine. Wuthering Heights is a novel with a difference and should be read just for that one reason alone. Literary critic Elizabeth Drew describes Catherine and Heathcliff as “creatures of the wild moorland existence beside which conventional standards are meaningless.” Their untameable passion spills out of the book darkening the entire moorland of their existence. Catherine is the daughter of Earnshaw, a squire in the eighteenth-century Yorkshire. Earnshaw has a son too: Hindley. Heathcliff comes into the family as a foundling and supplants Hindley in the affections of both the bland squire and his energetic daughter. The squire does not

The human world is darkly comical. The twenty-first century has only added more sound and fury to the comedy. D B C Pierre’s novel, Vernon God Little , gives us all that dark humour on a platter. As Vernon is going to turn 16, he is arrested for complicity in a serial killing which his friend Jesus Navarro committed. Jesus could not endure the bullying any further and he pulled the trigger on sixteen of his fellow students before killing himself. The novel tells the story of the investigation. How people react to Vernon’s arrest and related events bring out the hollowness of their thoughts and feelings. Vernon’s mother, Doris, is more worried about the fridge that she has been waiting for though she does console her son saying that mothers love their sons even if the sons are murderers. She is in no hurry to believe her son’s assertion of his innocence. Soon she develops an affair with Eulalio Ledesma, who claims to be a TV reporter, though he is in fact a TV repairman t

Source: Acting Company A. A. Milne’s one-act play, The Ugly Duckling , acquired a classical status because of the hearty humour used to present a profound theme. The King and the Queen are worried because their daughter Camilla is too ugly to get a suitor. In spite of all the devious strategies employed by the King and his Chancellor, the princess remained unmarried. Camilla was blessed with a unique beauty by her two godmothers but no one could see any beauty in her physical appearance. She has an exquisitely beautiful character. What use is character? The King asks. The play is an answer to that question. Character plays the most crucial role in our moral science books and traditional rhetoric, religious scriptures and homilies. When it comes to practical life, we look for other things such as wealth, social rank, physical looks, and so on. As the King says in this play, “If a girl is beautiful, it is easy to assume that she has, tucked away inside her, an equally beauti