Tomichan Matheikal's blog

The following is an extract from my new book Coping with Suffering . Your suffering is your choice to a great extent in Hinduism. Your karma determines what comes your way. Karma is the principle that governs the unfolding of events in your life. Your karma depends on the integrity with which you lived your previous lives. It is not a punishment because unlike in the Abrahamic religions there is no punitive God sitting in any heaven meting out retribution to people. Karma is the unfolding of the moral law that drives the whole universe. As Dr S Radhakrishnan put it, “The working of karma is wholly dispassionate, just, neither cruel nor merciful.” It is not about cruelty or mercy. It is the natural consequence of what you do. If you eat salt, you will drink water. Quite as simple as that. There is no escape from it because it is part of the eternal law of the universe which is applicable to everything and everybody in the universe without any discrimination. The high and the low,

Pilate and Jesus, a painting by James Tissot, 19th century French painter When Jesus came out wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe, Pilate said to them, “Behold the man!” [Bible – John 19:5] One of the most poignant passages I came across recently is the following. Those who wounded us were not superior, impressive beings who knew our special weaknesses and justly targeted them. They were themselves highly frantic, damaged creatures trying their best to cope with the litany of private sorrows to which every life condemns us. The lines belong to a book titled The School of Life: An emotional education co-authored by 20-odd writers. I stopped reading the book after reading those lines. I was struck by a lot of thoughts. An image rose from the depth of my consciousness. It was the image of Jesus standing mangled before a hostile mob that bayed for his blood. The same people who had flocked to him for his miracles primarily and for his counsels secondarily

Presenting my new book The corona-virus disease made me think about human suffering. This book is the result. The following extract from the introductory chapter will give you an idea what the book is like. Extract: Life is a constant struggle. It is a struggle against many odds such as the vagaries of nature, threats to health, manmade evils, and an endless list of other things that appear from nowhere. There is no escape from suffering. To be human is to suffer, to endure. This is the first thing we need to accept if we wish to understand life and be as happy as we possibly could. Even religions teach us the necessity of suffering while believing in omnipotent deities who should theoretically be able to remove suffering from life. The quintessential symbol of Christianity, the cross, is a symbol of suffering. In Christianity, salvation is possible only when the believer is ready to carry out within himself Christ’s destiny of suffering, death, and resurrection. Life is d

The heart has always ruled the human world. Otherwise religions would not have survived so long. Religions and their gods are some of the most powerful and widely used entities for taming the human heart. Gods long to reside in the heart. If gods actually resided in our hearts, our world would have been a paradise. We know that it is dangerous to let god(s) enter our hearts. So we keep them in churches, temples, and other such places, and lock them up too except at times specified by us. We decide when to let gods into our lives. We decide when gods should stay shut up in a tabernacle or a sanctum sanctorum.   If we actually take god into our hearts, we would have to request Him (or Her, if you prefer) to avert His eyes a thousand times a day. A lot of things that our hearts make us do are not what God would approve of. A lot of our actions are driven by greed, jealousy, hatred, and so on. We even go to the extent of justifying those actions which have such wicked root

Book Review Life is a mystery to be lived and not a riddle to be solved. One of the fundamental differences between spirituality and philosophy is in this approach to life. Spirituality teaches us to embrace life with faith while philosophy analyses it with reason. Faith is a gift. Catholic theologian Hans Kung goes to the extent of associating religious faith with Erik Erikson’s psychological concept of ‘basic trust’. Erikson postulates basic trust as the first component of a healthy personality. What is this basic trust? “An attitude toward oneself and the world derived from the experiences of the first year of life.” It is a reasonable trustfulness as far as others are concerned and simple sense of trustworthiness as far as oneself is concerned. This attitude is established first of all in a healthy mother-child relationship. The mother gives the most fundamental sense of security to a child from which sense develops the child’s attitudes to the realities that it wi

Book Review The author of this book, Durga Prasad Dash, loves India genuinely. His patriotism is rooted in deep awareness of the country’s history, culture and values. His latest book, My Village My Country: Glimpses into the Heart and Soul of Hindustan , wears the author’s patriotism on its jacket. Though the author states in the beginning that the book contains “articles about my village and the small town where I spent most of my childhood,” we are ushered to a whole smorgasbord of the diversity that characterises India. The author’s village is only a springboard. Get ready to dive into an expansive lake of exquisite historical, cultural and aesthetic delights. Since the author belongs to Odisha, we get more delicacies from that state. We begin our odyssey [or Odissi if you prefer] with the rituals of Bali Jatra and Boita Bandana and move on to a lot more like Danda Nacha and Pala Nacha. We get glimpses of the Konark temple, Raghurajpur’s palm-leaf paintings, and th

Book Review Very few people can make history interesting to read. Most of our history books are written in such dull and prosaic style that only academicians can endure them. As a school student, I detested my history books. After school, I never touched history books until I came across writers like William Dalrymple. Recently I read Wendy Doniger’s Alternative History of Hinduism and fell in love with her – her style, I mean. Sonia Dogra has chosen to present history in verse in her new book, Unlocked . She has clubbed poems on historical personalities together under the heading, ‘The Famous and the Infamous’, and the latter half of the book is titled ‘Epoch-Making Episodes’. People and events make up history. What makes Sonia’s book interesting is the fact that she has chosen some unusual aspect of history as the subject of each of these poems. The very first poem, for example, is about Hitler. We meet the 6-year-old Hitler, however. The abuses from his father had