Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Illustration adapted from Bhashaposhini, Malayalam monthly The Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently carried out a study titled ‘Estimating the global spread of COVID-19’. India may emerge as one of the worst-hit nations, according to the study which puts the figure at 287,000 cases per day in the country by Feb 2021. The discovery of a vaccine may save us yet. One thing is certain at any rate: the world won’t be the same for quite a while after Covid-19 has had its thandav . The world is changing pretty fast already. Many of our activities are going digital. I am a teacher by profession and my classes are all online this academic session so far. And it will surely continue online for months to come. I am teaching students whom I have never seen face-to-face. Most of them don’t show their faces online for various reasons like lack of strong network. So I continue to each nondescript entities, faceless people. This facelessness is going to be one of the bigges

Tara Westover Title: Educated Author: Tara Westover Publisher: Penguin, 2018 Pages: 384 Price: INR 499 Tara Westover is just 34 years old and yet her memoir has a lot to offer, a lot more than many people much older would have. Hers was a difficult childhood, thanks primarily to her parents and also to one of her siblings. Even when she grew up into maturity, her family wouldn’t grant her the freedom to be herself. But she liberated herself from the family and thus found her own voice. It was a process of education, she says. Hence the title of the book. Family is one of the many givens in our lives. We had no choice about our parents first of all. Then the siblings. We spend the most crucial part of our life, helpless infancy and childhood, with these people. Our parents and siblings form our personalities to a great extent well before we are able to know what is being done to us. Tara’s father was an orthodox Mormon who also, in all probability, suffered from

Fiction Bleu, a painting by Joan Miro, Spanish artist “How did I get pregnant? We only did it online, na ?” Sheila repeats the question and Raghav looks out the window once again. Vehicles are plying with the usual hurry and impatience on the network of flyovers outside the most reputed hospital in the city of New Delhi. Standing in a VIP room on the seventh floor of the hospital, Raghav can see the flyovers and the vehicles. He can also see the parking lot of the hospital crammed with all sorts of cars and bikes. A crowd of patients and their relatives wait outside the hospital. Raghav had rushed to the hospital as soon as he got Sheila’s phone call. That was past midnight. “The highway patrol cops brought me here,” she told him on the phone. Her car had dashed against a divider. She must have been drunk as usual, Raghav thought. Sheila works with a national newspaper and her duty ends somewhere around midnight when the paper goes to print. Raghav used to work f

I worked as a lecturer in English at an undergrad college in Shillong for a few years. Now the post is known by some bombastic appellation, I know. Professors are supposed to do a lot of things other than teaching, may be to justify their enormous pay packets. The teaching job is done only for a few hours in a week. The rest of the time is supposed to be utilised for research, writing scholarly papers, and speaking at as well as attending seminars. The novel which I completed reading the other day – Less by Andrew Sean Greer – satirises these scholarly seminars organised by universities. The protagonist, Arthur Less who is a mediocre novelist, is invited to address one of these conferences. On reaching the university, which is in another country altogether, Less learns that hardly anyone in his audience understands his language. Moreover, the Head of the Department who has organised the seminar won’t be attending it. He organised it just for the sake of getting an opportunity

Book Review Title: Less Author: Andrew Sean Greer Publisher: Hachette Pages: 261 Price in India: Rs 499 Failure is as multi-faceted as success. You can fail in more ways than you may succeed. “Full many a flower” of Thomas Gray blushed unseen in the desert air, thanks to this universal tendency of failure. A lot of excellent writers end up as bloggers while more mediocre ones become best sellers, also thanks to this same principle. The same can be said of any profession. Andrew Sean Greer’s novel, Less , which won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize is about a failed writer called Arthur Less. The blurb asks the question “Who says you can’t run away from your problems?” implying that Less failed because he did not face his problems. He did not, true. Can not-being-able-to-face your problems be one of the many facets of failure? Take a look at the successes around you. Are they all geniuses? How many mediocre people have risen high, too high, and shone brilliantly t

Image from Times of India We are all one and the same reality, parts of the eternal Brahman. That is one of the fundamental teachings of the Advaita philosophy of Hinduism. While I referred to that rather casually the other day, one of my acquaintances expressed horror and said, “Just imagine me being the same stuff as Narendra Modi and Amit Shah!” The inmost essence of all beings is the same, asserts Chandogya Upanishad (6.9). The whole world is one truth, one reality, one soul. The Upanishad compares us creatures to rivers that arise in the mountains. Some rivers flow to the east and some to the west, yet they all end in the ocean, become the ocean itself, and realise that they are all the same. In fact, they just merge into the one big ocean and lose their identity altogether. My friend’s horror sent a shiver down my spine too. I stood trying to imagine Narendra Modi’s and Amit Shah’s souls merging with mine and my gentle kitten’s souls and becoming one. O my God! I

Fiction Pandey ji had become old enough to lose sleep over small things as well as very small things. As a younger man he knew how to make his students lose sleep. He was a teacher, a very strict one. Woe to any student who did not submit Pandey ji’s assignments on time. You could manage all other teachers somehow: an apology or a sprinkle of flattery or a “token of affection” – this last was a gift like a pen or something. “Ma’am, when I saw this in the shop I remembered you.” And ma’am forgives your lapse with the assignment. But Pandey ji was above all such temptations. Students trembled at the very sight of Pandey ji. It is said that some students even passed urine in their trousers out of sheer fright if Pandey ji caught them for some error or mischief or negligence. If Pandey ji was the invigilator, no examinee would ever dream of indulging in any malpractice. Pandey ji kept an eagle eye on every student in the room. It was said that he had an X-ray vision that could s