Tomichan Matheikal's blog

  How reliable are our memories? Not much, as a source of objective truths. Memories do play a vital role in our lives for various reasons. But if you think your memories are the true records of what really happened in the past, you are mistaken. “Remembering is not a passionate or dispassionate retelling of a reality that is no more, but a new birth of the past,” says Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich in her book, The Unwomanly Face of War . Memory doesn’t merely remember what actually happened but re-creates it. The narrator of Julian Barnes’s novel, The Sense of an Ending , says rightly that what we end up remembering isn’t always the same as what we have witnessed. We add colours and patterns in order to make painful realities more acceptable. We “adjust, embellish, make sly cuts,” as Barnes puts it. We don’t do it consciously. We are not being villains by adjusting, embellishing, and making those sly cuts. On the contrary, we are doing our best to make sense of what has happe

"Crumbling is not an instant's act": Emily Dickinson If I were given a choice to order something from the cosmos, I would want an intelligent entity from another galaxy to come and teach certain essential lessons to my fellow creatures on earth. I’m pretty sure that there are a lot of intelligent entities out there in the infinite spaces. Like Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s Little Prince, for example. Just imagine Little Prince standing before Amit Shah and telling him in all innocence that “it is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” Imagine the Yogi of UP being told, “The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart.” The Little Prince isn’t an intellectual giant. He is a child. But he has a far more advanced consciousness than anyone on our earth. That consciousness sets him on a pedestal high above the greatest of people on earth. Come and teach us that level of conscio

  Book Review Title: You are Blooming Author: Swarnali Nath Amazon E-book, 2020   “Let noble thoughts come to us from every side,” Rig Veda exhorts. We live in rather ignoble times. A global pandemic has revealed more potently than anything else our vulnerability even before a microscopic virus. In spite of that, we don’t seem to learn the essential lessons. We keep fighting in the names of gods and religions. We keep chopping people’s heads to prove the might of our gods. Nations threaten one another for a few acres of land in the border areas. Men rape and kill little girls for reasons that only they and their gods know. No, we won’t ever learn lessons. That is why certain lessons become more and more relevant in spite of the fact that they are not new. Certain stories of love and compassion, grace and beauty, sunshine and bliss need be told again and again. We need be reminded again and again of our capacity for regeneration, the urgent need for that regeneration. This is

  Jack London - Image from here For the 1 st part of this, click here . Wolf Larsen, the protagonist of Jack London’s novel The Sea Wolf , is a devil for all practical purposes. He can be ruthlessly cruel if he wants. He can engage you in an intellectual conversation about morality or literature when he is in the mood for that. He can throw one of his crew into the ocean just because his shirt stinks. When that man loses a foot to a shark in the ocean before being pulled aboard, Larsen can shrug his shoulders saying that the shark was not in his control or plan. What makes Wolf Larsen a charming devil is his brutal honesty. He knows that life has no purpose other than prolong itself as much as it can. “You have no fictions, no dreams, no ideals,” the narrator tells Wolf. It is fictions, dreams, and ideals that constitute nobility. We would all be subhuman brutes without our fictions, dreams, and ideals. Add Wolf’s brutal honesty to that and we would be heartless devils. What kee

  Caliban The devil is a far more interesting character than god in the Bible and quite a lot of Christian literature like Paradise Lost . He is authentic. His authenticity makes him rebel against god who is a bombastic and whimsical character. The devil’s problem, however, is not with god’s self-conceit and capriciousness. His problem is why he should endure all that and remain a slave to such an entity. The devil has self-respect and wants to assert his individuality and dignity. Hierarchical systems don’t like people with self-respect and individuality. Human beings love to create hierarchies. Our gods sit at the top of all our hierarchies and they are as hideous entities as the creators of our hierarchies. Our gods are the supernatural projections of our leaders. In other words, our gods are created in the images of our leaders who create our hierarchies. Our leaders obviously know how to make use of these gods for various purposes: political as well as others. You can bring a

Living in the past is a psychological disease. Psychology has identified clear signs of the disease. If a person tends to speak about his past too much, about certain people who caused him pain in the past, and compares his present situation with previous ones, you can be pretty sure the guy has serious problems from the past that need be resolved in order for him to live a healthy present life. Such people tend to be attracted to or obsessed with the same type of people that caused them pain in the past. Their disagreements often surround past arguments. They are easily bored or frustrated. They indulge in self-sabotaging behaviour. After Mr Modi became the Prime Minister, India behaves like the pathological patient described above. We as a nation keep talking about past glories and wounds. Our entire discourses are constructed around past events that should have been buried long ago. We are wreaking vengeance on today’s people for offences committed by their supposed ancestors ce

  One of the mysteries that has baffled me again and again, like a cancerous pain, is the cosy coexistence of religions and cruelty. All kinds of cruelties were imposed on fellow human beings in the name of gods ever since religions were born. We did it in ancient India. They did it in all ancient civilisations. Compassion is the very root of Christianity’s theology. Yet no religion was as ruthlessly cruel as that for centuries in the medieval period. Islam has continued that ruthlessness, which Christianity gave up a few centuries ago, up to this day. Hinduism, under Mr Modi’s charismatic leadership, seems to be all set to take up the same tradition now – with a slight difference: Mr Modi’s acolytes have changing tastes. Young girls seem to be the favoured targets these days. Lynching in the name of cows was in vogue till the other day. Perhaps, the fad may change again soon since fads don’t have much longevity even with divine sanctions. Why are our gods such dismal failures? T