Tomichan Matheikal's blog

  Today, 18 Dec, is Minority Rights Day. India should celebrate this day heart and soul for various reasons. First of all, as Shashi Tharoor claims in his new book The Battle for Belonging , everyone in India is in the minority one way or another. Take this example from Tharoor himself: A typical Indian stepping off a train, say, a Hindi-speaking Hindu male from Uttar Pradesh might cherish the illusion that he represents the ‘majority community’. He’s wrong, of course. As a Hindu he belongs to the faith adhered to by some 80% of the population, but his language, his caste, his state and its culture – none of these belongs to the majority. If he is visiting a state in the Northeast, he will be astounded by the realization of how much of a minority he really is. He will be quite an alien among the Garos of Meghalaya and the Kukis of Nagaland. The diversity of tiny Arunachal Pradesh alone will be enough to strip him of any hubris about a singular national culture. Why, in his own reli

Fiction Sivaraman was the last person whom I would expect to catch in a dim corner of a bar sitting before a glass of whisky and contemplating the sun waiting for the earth to reappear after a mythical deluge that had drowned the earth for some forty days. ‘The sun is an eternal lover,’ he told me as I sat down opposite him. ‘The earth is the beloved. Unfaithful beloved.’ He sighed like a Shakespearean furnace. ‘But the infidelity is due to helplessness. The flood is beyond the earth’s control.’ Sivaraman had met his old girlfriend that afternoon. She was the unfaithful earth that had emerged after the deluge. Megha was her name. She was the daughter of Bhargavan who was the caretaker of the Gopika estate where Sivaraman had joined relatively recently as the accountant. Gopika’s owner, Somasundaram, worked in Dubai though he was an ardent Indian nationalist who hated Muslims with all his heart. Gopika stretched across acres and acres of orchards and vegetable farms. Bhargavan w

  In one of his novels, O V Vijayan illustrates destiny with the story of a bullock. The bullock was one of the two used to draw a cart. This bullock was always tied on the right side of the cart and hence got most of the whiplashes the driver being right-handed. The bullock was not happy with his destiny and envied his counterpart on the left side. I added a twist to Vijayan’s story while discussing destiny once. The bullock prayed for a change; it wished to be on the left side of the cart. God answered the prayer. The bullock cart was sold and the new owner tied our bovine hero on the left side of the cart. But his destiny didn’t alter. The new driver was left-handed. You can’t escape the whip if it is in your destiny. Some whips are indeed ineluctable parts of your destiny. Your genes, for example. There are catastrophes that strike you with divine vengeance. Even your government can be your destiny with its policies that may hamstring you. As a young man, I poohpoohed the n

The Great Wall of Ahmedabad: symbol of Modi's poverty policy Image from The Hindu The ‘Hunger Watch’ survey conducted in Gujarat by Anna Suraksha Adhikar Abhiyan [ASAA] reveals that one out of every 5 persons in the marginalised communities of the state go hungry in these pandemic times. Some of them do not have even a single meal on certain days. This is happening in a state that has been projected as a model for development over decades. With a tragic irony, we should note that the same person who brought about that pathetic condition in Gujarat is ruling the country today. He has met every opposition to his imperial rule, every demand for justice and human rights, with an iron fist. He suppressed the protests against Citizenship Bill and Act. He spent a huge sum of money to erect a wall meant to hide a slum from visiting Donald Trump . The money spent on the wall would have been enough to rehabilitate the slum dwellers, to give them a life of dignity. But Modi chose to hide t

    Suffering is the university of egocentrism . Milan Kundera, Czech writer [1929-] Suffering is inevitable. That is a fundamental lesson of life. Religions teach us that, philosophy does, and literature shows the same too. While dealing with the inevitable though unwanted, our options are quite limited. We should change what can be changed and accept what cannot be changed. We may need to adapt ourselves in the face of what we cannot change. Religion, philosophy, the arts, and a lot of things can help us to make life easier in the face of suffering. Aren’t these things primarily meant for that: to help us make life bearable and as pleasant as possible? Why haven’t they been able to achieve their purposes? Obviously, they have not been used rightly. On the other hand, they have been misused by certain people. Religion joined hands with politics and became a tool in the hands of bigots or the power-hungry. Philosophy is dead for all practical purposes, killed by our pursuit of