Tomichan Matheikal's blog

  Book Review Title: The Shadow of the Wind Author: Carlos Ruiz Zafon Publisher: Phoenix, 2004 Pages: 510   Some plots are too perfect to be credible. But they keep the reader hooked to the last. Add some mysteries and complexities, the novel becomes a terrible whirlpool that draws your very soul in. Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind is one such novel. The novel is about memories and vendettas, love struggling against hate, virtue struggling to survive in a world of evil. Originally written in Spanish, the novel is set in the post-civil war Barcelona. But the pre-war Barcelona keeps coming up throughout the plot. In fact, the plot moves like two intertwined serpents that are inseparable. The past is resurrected at every turn on the present road, that too with a new vengeance. There is poison all along. There is blood spilt at some places. There is more darkness than light. Is it evil that makes this world so dark? ‘Not evil,’ says Fermin, one of the chief charac

  What makes life really worthwhile is learning. The best remedy for sadness is to learn something, as a character in T H White’s The Once and Future King says. “You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics…” The character goes on. Base minds will tread upon your honour. Small minds will divide your people into we and they. Then they will be made to wage mindless wars. The world is a bad, sad place. There is only one remedy: to learn. “Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust…” I have been a teacher throughout my working life. Now that I stand at the fag end of that career, I am happy to note that the feedback has always been highly supportive. My students have given me (and continue to do so) enough and

  One of the many allegations I face occasionally, after Mr Modi became the PM, is that I hate Hindus or Hinduism or both. This allegation was hurled at me yet again yesterday on Facebook by a person who worked with me for a couple of months in the same school where I taught in Delhi. It began with a 4-year-old blog post of mine in which I argued that the RSS view of Onam, which is the same as the North Indian view, will never be acceptable to Malayalis for whom the Asura Maveli, rather than the god-incarnate Vamana, is the real hero for obvious reasons. The above-mentioned friend first questioned my knowledge of Hindu scriptures because he, like most others of the fold, thinks that a non-Hindu does not care to study Hinduism. When he realised that I had perhaps more knowledge about Hindu scriptures than himself, he changed his charge against me. He said I refused to accept his good intention. When I questioned his intention, he changed his allegation again: I lacked “the purity of

An old tree in my village When I was in my late twenties I used to long for death. I didn’t want to go on beyond my thirties at least. Middle aged people were the greatest bores I had ever come across and I didn’t want to reach that stage. Moreover, I worked as a schoolteacher in Shillong in those days. The remuneration was a pittance whose lion’s share disappeared as house rent right at the beginning of the month. The end of the month would usually demand some tightening of the belt. Not a very charming existence even without the boredom added by the middle-aged moralists of various hues. My middle age turned out to be the best period of my life, however. Life proffers interesting ironies. I landed in Delhi at the age of 41 with nothing more than some meagre savings and an attenuated willingness to experiment with life. The job I received at a residential school in Delhi had the charms of a Homeric Siren: at once enchanting and enslaving. The enslavement was as much a delight

  Image  Creator: Max Slaven  Copyright: Street Level Photoworks This morning broke with two messages about Muslims in India. The first was Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyar’s article in the Times of India and the other was a WhatsApp message. Both reveal an acute concern of non-Muslims about the backwardness of Muslims in India and the problems engendered by that backwardness. Aiyar’s article is an open letter to Asaduddin Owaisi who recently lamented the pathetic condition of Indian Muslims vis-à-vis education. Aiyar rightly argues that the Muslims must help themselves in this matter as the Christians did long ago. “Instead of depending on the state,” Aiyar writes, “Christians have long created their own educational institutions of excellence.” Even today, when Ram Raj is enforcing itself on the nation, Christian educational institutions remain in high demand among non-Christians. “Hindus and Muslims pull all possible strings to get into them,” says Aiyar. The Muslim community

  Image Source: India.com Kerala is celebrating Onam, the grandest festival of the state. Onam is a festival of colours, flowers, music and abundance. In my childhood, Onam was projected as a harvest festival thus making it absolutely secular. The mythical legend of Mahabali (or Maveli as he was popularly and affectionately called by Malayalis) played relatively little role in the actual celebrations. The festive mood tended to supersede the legend though images of a pot-bellied Maveli made their presence felt ubiquitously. Perhaps people aren’t too keen to scrutinise the Maveli legend because the legend doesn’t put the gods in any good light. Maveli is an Asura (demon) king who turns out to be far better than the gods. The gods, therefore, become jealous of him and an avatar of Vishnu descends to decimate the beloved king of the humans. In her scholarly book, The Hindus – An Alternative History , Wendy Doniger says that the relationships between humans, gods, and asuras in the h

  Book Review Title: The Mirror & the Light Author: Hilary Mantel Publisher: 4 th Estate, London, 2020 Pages: 883 Price in India: 799   The first two volumes of Hilary Mantel’s trilogy told us the story of Thomas Cromwell’s rise from a hamlet of Putney to Henry VIII’s palace. The battered son of an uncultured blacksmith and brewer rises to become the most powerful person in England after the king. The first two volumes, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies , described the rise of this shrewd manipulator. The last one, The Mirror & the Light , delineates the inevitable fall of the tragic hero. Mantel’s undertaking seems to be to show us that Cromwell was indeed a tragic hero rather than a mere manipulator who ascended too high. She does that job eminently too. This last volume of the trilogy is as gripping as the other two if not more endearing by its slower pace and more poetic diction. Nearly hundred characters are brought together in this massive book to tell u