Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Nah, it isn’t at all as you say. You taught me that honesty is the best policy and truth will prevail in the end. But at the age of 60, I know much better. I have seen crooks and frauds climbing higher and higher on the rungs of sheer dishonesty and ruthless manipulation. You know what: you can kill a few thousand people and yet appear like a saint or even a god-incarnate provided you have an efficient PRO. Life’s as simple as that: a good PRO. You don’t even have to have any public relationships. Your office will do all that. You need other skills and you know what they are; they have nothing to do with all those great values and principles you corrupted me with in the name of god and other nonsense. Gods are the best jokes. They claim to love and then get millions killed. They literally suck, man. I think more crimes are committed in their names than for anything else. Look at the representatives of gods around us: yogis, sadhvis, bishops and cardinals, mullas and maulavis… If th

  When I was a kid I was taught that God was a mystery. God’s mysteriousness was the ultimate answer to all questions which had otherwise no sensible answers. Why did God create the graceful deer and at the same time the murderous tiger? Answer: God’s ways are inscrutable, boy. I grew up and found it impossible to accept that answer. Like William Blake, I was buffeted time and again by the question whether the same god created both the tiger and the lamb. “What immortal hand or eye / Could frame (the tiger’s) fearful symmetry?” “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” The poet sees God in the lamb too. “He (God) is called by thy name,” the poet tells the lamb. “He is meek and he is mild.” Who is the real god now? The fearful symmetry of the tiger or the gentle meekness of the lamb: which is the real face of god? Are the terrorists who keep killing ordinary people in the name of certain gods the real men of god? Is the boy who chopped off the head of his teacher for the sake of a

  Image from India Today “Between us and reality are our feelings .” Svetlana Alexievich We won’t want to remember Phulmoni Dasi. She was a little girl of 10 when she was married to 30-year-old Hari Mohan Maiti. She died in the night of her marriage as her husband attained the bliss of orgasm which is a man’s right and privilege according to our great custom and tradition. Our glorified ancient culture which insisted that the wife’s virginity should be proved in the “first night” itself. The blood of her broken hymen should stain the bedsheet. But the British government in India at that time did not accept that as any greatness. Hari Mohan was charged with “causing grievous hurt by act endangering life or personal safety of others” and was sentenced to 12 months of hard labour. Within 6 months of that incident, on 9 Jan 1891, the Viceroy of India, Lord Lansdowne presented a bill before the Council of India seeking to amend a relevant section of the Indian Penal Code. Consequently,

  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