Tomichan Matheikal's blog

  One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez [1967] is an epic that tells the story of six generations. It is a kaleidoscopic novel that blends myth and philosophy, history and magic, humour and grief so seamlessly that it defies classification. Literary critics have given the label of ‘magical realism’ to Marquez’s style. His books lie beyond any facile label, however. It is difficult to interpret Marquez’s novels for the same reason. Layers of meaning emerge as we read them. The more you read, the profounder the meanings appear. Profoundly complex. One Hundred Years of Solitude transcends any simple interpretations. This post looks at just one character: Colonel Aureliano Buendia. The novel begins with him and ends with him, so to say. “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” That is the opening sentence of the novel. Towards the end of the novel,

  Remedios the Beauty is a character in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude . Like most members of her family, she too belongs to solitude. But unlike others, she is very innocent too. Physically she is the most beautiful woman ever seen in Macondo, the place where the story of her family unfolds. Is that beauty a reflection of her innocence? Well, Marquez doesn’t suggest that explicitly. But there is an implication to that effect. Innocence does make people look charming. What else is the charm of children? Remedios’s beauty is dangerous, however. She is warned by her great grandmother, who is losing her eyesight, not to appear before men. The girl’s beauty coupled with her innocence will have disastrous effects on men. But Remedios is unaware of “her irreparable fate as a disturbing woman.” She is too innocent to know such things though she is an adult physically. Every time she appears before outsiders she causes a panic of exasperation. To make mat

  We live in spurious times. The realities around us are manufactured by the media, by governments, corporations, religions, and organisations. What is really tragic is that spuriousness is accepted as normal. You keep sending messages knowing that they are spurious. You know it, the receiver of your messages knows it, everyone knows it – that the messages are spurious. Yet the messages keep coming and going. Infinity of them. They have a purpose. Otherwise they wouldn’t survive so long. The method wouldn’t survive, rather: the method of manufacturing realities through fake messages on various media. The process is not confined to social media; you can find it in all the media: the print, the electronic, you name it. Don’t forget that even the road is a part of media. Have you observed the enormous billboards on roadsides? If you have, you will understand how they manufacture realities for you. We can’t live without the media. One way or another we are all parts of it. We receive

  Today is the 131 st birth anniversary of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India. A tribute. Nehru studied in England for seven years after which he wrote: “I have become a queer mixture of East and West, out of place everywhere, at home nowhere.” His profound philosophical and romantic longings made him out of place in the West while his love of science and technology rendered him out of place in India. The India that Nehru inherited from history’s mishmash was a wretched place. In the words of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins [ Freedom at Midnight ], India in 1947 was a country that had a leper population the size of Switzerland. There were as many priests in India as there were Belgians in Belgium, enough beggars to populate all of Holland, 11 million holy men, and 20 million aborigines. Some 10 million Indians were essentially nomads, exercising hereditary occupations as snake charmers, fortune tellers, gypsies, jugglers, water diviners, magicians, tight-ro

  Arundhati Roy with Maoists - from Outlook A university in Tamil Nadu has withdrawn Arundhati Roy’s book, Walking with the Comrades , from its postgraduate English syllabus because the student’s wing [ABVP] of BJP wanted the ban. BJP and its allies pretend to be as bold as Chhatrapati Shivaji or Ma Durga, but when it comes to actual encounters they are as timid as the dogs outside their territories. The way they demand bans on books, arrests of writers and activists, and censorship of the media points to a sort of deep cowardice. Let us confine this discussion to Ms Roy and her concerned book. It was actually an essay published in the Outlook in March 2010 after the author’s visit to the Maoists in the Dandakaranya forests. The Congress was the ruling party in Delhi at that time and so the criticism of the government should hit the Congress rather than the BJP and its allies. What irks the ABVP then? Well, there’s as much difference between the Congress and the BJP as between

My pension is a princely sum of Rs 1812. Having completed 35 years of teaching, I retire with that monthly pension. Someone had warned me not to count on the pension at all as the amount won’t be enough even to meet one’s most basic requirements. But I had not imagined the amount to be as beggarly as what landed in my bank account on the first working day of this month. My first impulse was to laugh as I stared at the phone message: “Your A/C [number] has credit for BY SALARY of Rs 1812…” [sic]. I thought it was some mistake. When I found out that it was the monthly pension granted to me by my magnanimous government which is Sabka Saath for Sabka Vikas, my laughter became boisterous enough to draw Maggie’s attention. “What’s the joke?” She asked. She was not quite chuffed with our government’s largesse. “Be a true patriot and chant three cheers for our Minimum Government, Maximum Governance,” I advised her. “We are children of lesser gods,” I philosophised with a grin that woul

  Read the report from DNA A gang in Yogi Adityanath’s Uttar Pradesh has put out a rate chart. Just 5000 rupees for thrashing your rival and a mere 55,000 for killing him. Dirt cheap, I should say. I certainly wouldn’t like to be killed for such a low sum. Even dogs are priced higher in other places. However, we don’t need be surprised. In Yogi’s UP anything is possible. It is the crime centre of the human world. In 2019, UP accounted for nearly 15% of all registered crimes against women in India. That percentage may not give you a clear idea. Look at the actual figure: 59853 registered crimes against women. That is an astounding figure of 164 per day. Every ten minutes a woman is attacked in that state. That is by the records. Unofficially the number is much higher. Not even half the cases are registered in that state where the police are greater criminals than the goons who sell their services rather too cheap. If a woman goes to complain, she will end up being gangraped in the p