Tomichan Matheikal's blog

One of the roads in my village which I discovered during the lockdown It has been two months now since most of us were shut in at home. When it started I thought the medical science would bring the coronavirus to its knees. After all, our science took us to the infinite interstellar spaces and also to the microscopic spaces between electrons. This science gave us so much that we grew up trusting its omnipotence. I did, at least. Well, almost. On 23 March, when the Prime Minister put the country under a lockdown in his characteristic magisterial style, I did hope that science would invent a remedy on the 22 nd day – a day after the lockdown was to end. My Prime Minister’s aplomb elicited that hope from me.   I marked the count-down on my calendar. When the lockdown entered the second week, my hope and trust both flagged. I stopped marking countdown on the calendar. I knew the world was going to kneel down before a microscopic virus. I chose to read and write all the ti

Truth is the handmaid of power. As American philosopher Barrows Dunham put it in his book Man Against Myth , “Generally speaking, truth has been suffered to exist in the world just to the extent that it profited the rulers of society.” If the truths in our scriptures came from the gods, then our gods were also in collusion with those people who wielded the power. Who decided, for instance, that Sanskrit was the language of the gods and the men of the gods, and that the lower caste people should not even hear it spoken? Which gods would have benefited by having molten lead poured into the ears of the lower caste people if they happened to hear the Sanskrit shlokas even inadvertently? Who created the hierarchy of the caste system in the first place? Why did the Bible make the Serpent tempt Eve rather than Adam? The man who created the myth was creating the ‘truth’ that the woman is a dangerous creature and should always be kept subservient to the male of the species.

Book Review History is a myth whose meaning depends on from whose point of view you look at it. India has been witnessing an unprecedented rewriting of its history ever since Narendra Modi became its Prime Minister. Erstwhile heroes are turning villains and vice-versa. History belongs to those who wield the power. But we are not living in the days of landlords and vassals anymore. Anyone can make her views available to the whole world today without any difficulty making use of the various media available. Hence history is no more a potent tool in the hands of the power-wielders and their brokers. Wendy Doniger’s book, The Hindus: An Alternative History , is an example of how history can be seen from yet another angle. Doniger is an American Indologist who is turning 80. She is a scholar of Sanskrit and Hinduism. She has written many books on Hinduism, its sacred books and gods apart from translating the Rig Veda , The Laws of Manu , and the Kamasutra into English from

Migrant workers returning home in India The world won’t be much different after the coronavirus has done with its yomp. Quite a lot of people would have vanished from the face of the earth altogether. There may not even be a tomb to mark their final rest. Those who are fortunate to be left behind may wonder what life is all about. Is it anything more than Shakespeare’s tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing? A walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more? What happened to all those multi-speciality hospitals, surgical expertise, billion-dollar machinery? The wireless brain sensors and the robotic surgeons buckled. Precision medicines and Virtual Reality devices capitulated. Will the global telemedicine market be worth the prophesied $113.1 billion by 2025? Will CRISPR [Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats] be the new God with its advanced gene-editing technology? M

When I officially turned a senior citizen last month, one of the birthday greetings that came on Facebook described me as “the kindest man born in the cruellest month”. The greeting was from an old friend who had long ago referred to me as a paradox. Paradox sounds too elite and I know that I am not any kinder than April is cruel. So I choose to describe me as an ‘anomaly’ for my young friend, Aditya Narayan Mohanty , who is asking fellow bloggers to "Define your life in a single word and tell me the story behind that"   #SingleWordThatCanDefineMe . An anomaly is something or someone that deviates from the standard, normal, or the expected. That is quite an apt description of me in a single word, Aditya, when aptness has to coexist with brevity. A deviation, an aberration, a wart that might as well be excised. I’m sure you’re familiar with Swift’s Gulliver. I often feel like Gulliver. Whether in Lilliput of miniature people or Brobdingnag of giants, Gulliver is

A page from my book, English Poetry A few months before the coronavirus started holding mankind hostage, I attended a wedding some 80 km from my home. When I was about to leave for home after the dinner, the host who was a close relative of mine asked me, “Can you take Father X with you. His seminary is on the way to your home. Just drop him there on your way.” “Is he the priest who delivered the sermon today?” I asked. Yes, my host said. I’d be glad to take him, I said. I loved his sermon. The sermon is a part of the usual Catholic religious ritual called Mass. It is nothing more than a plebeian elaboration on a biblical passage delivered by a priest for the mediocre believer. I have listened to hundreds of wedding sermons all of which were slight variations on the qualities of ideal Christian couples. But Fr X’s sermon caught my attention. The comatose romantic in me was resurrected right away as he started with the example of the honeymoon of Adam and Eve in the

12 May is International Nurse's Day.  The only time I spent as many as ten days at a stretch in a hospital was when I fractured my foot following a fall from my scooter. That was four years ago. I lay in the hospital bed with my leg bandaged heavily from knee to foot and raised on a couple of pillows. My surgeon accompanied by a junior doc and a nurse came every morning to examine the condition of my foot. Nurses came at regular intervals to give me medicines as well as to check whether I was following instructions properly.  There was a particular nurse who came at about 6 o'clock every morning to give me quite a few medicines one of which was an injection. One morning when she came I was in the washroom. She was not quite chuffed with my adventure. I didn't tell her that I was doing it every morning with the help of the walker I had got a relative to steal into my room. I explained to her that I had no other choice in that matter. She understood though she warned me