Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Bogey-Beast There is a fairy tale about a poor, little, old woman who is very cheerful by nature. She runs errands for her neighbours and lives by what they give her in return for her services or in plain charity. During one of her carefree sojourns, she sees a pot lying in a ditch. Though she doesn’t have anything worthwhile to keep in such a pot, she decides to retrieve it from the ditch. When she gets to it, she is amazed to see gold coins overflowing from the pot. She carries the heavy pot full of gold coins thinking that she has become awfully rich until she feels tired and incapable of going on. She puts the pot down for a while. When she picks it up again, alas, it’s no more a pot of gold coins but just a mass of silver. Her happiness does not dwindle. Silver is better, she mutters to herself, because it’s less trouble. Thieves won’t be attracted by silver as much as by gold. But the next time she puts the mass of silver down out of fatigue, it metamorphoses into a lump of

  Fiction “Damodar!” The cry that was an ethereal mix of joy, surprise, and agony staggered me. I looked at the old man who had uttered that cry looking into my eyes. I had just come out from a shopping mall in the city which I was visiting after a very long period though it was the city that nurtured my childhood. I stared at the million wrinkles that crisscrossed his sunken cheeks, at his bald head, into his sad eyes… “Timur…” I whispered hesitantly. “Yes,” the man said with relief as well as heightened joy. It was Amir Timur, my childhood friend. The boy who told me, “Arey yaar, you should celebrate Diwali,” when I told him that my father was against firecrackers which did no good to anyone including the earth’s stratosphere. He took me to the junkyard behind his hut and took out the crackers he had bought on the way and gave me a matchbox. “Come on, this is your Diwali.” He said. “Celebrate it. Darn the stratosphere.” Timur and I became best friends. I visited his hut and

 " ... The deaths of twenty Indian soldiers [in the Galwan Valley] did nothing for the morale of the very soldiers from whose shoulders Prime Minister Modi and his BJP like to fire the empty bullets of their nationalism." Shashi Tharoor , The Battle of Belonging Nationalism is quite an absurd thing in independent nations. When you are free as a nation to forge your destiny any way you want, what job has nationalism to do? Nationalism is an assertion of a nation’s rights and privileges against an enemy. For example, India’s nationalism during the British rule was needed and valuable. Once the coloniser is gone, nationalism should give way to nation-building. Shashi Tharoor’s latest book, The Battle of Belonging , takes a deep and wide look at the subject. The book is divided into six sections. The first , The Idea of Nationalism, analyses the subject in great detail viewing it from all possible angles. There are varieties of nationalism like religious nationalism, territo

  “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out,” said Vaclav Havel. Things don’t turn out well generally in the human world where Murphy’s law is quite universal: What can go wrong will surely do. Our endeavours to make conquests are often like Uncle Podger’s attempts to fix a picture on the wall. Uncle gets all the required things ready: hammer, ruler, step-ladder, kitchen-chair, and what not. Then he would lift up the picture and drop it and it would come out of the frame. While trying to save the glass, he cuts himself. He goes searching for his coat because his kerchief is in the coat pocket. He has forgotten where he left his coat. All the family members are put on a treasure hunt for his coat. “Doesn’t anybody in the whole house know where my coat is? I never came across such a set in all my life…” Uncle frets and fumes. “Six of you! And you can’t find a coat that I put down not 5 min

  Remember the Pink Chaddi campaign that rocked India in 2009? Hundreds of pink panties were couriered to Pramod Muthalik’s office by Indian women as a mark of protest against his organisation’s [Sri Ram Sena] offensive actions upon young couples found together on Valentine’s Day. The colour pink was chosen because that colour was considered to be conspicuously feminine. The campaign was a revolutionary assertion of autonomy by India’s women. Now look at this quote from a trade publication called Earnshaw’s Infants’ Department , published in 1918: “ The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.” Pink for boys and blue for girls. That was a century back. Today it’s just the opposite. Who makes such conventions? The society, of course. And randomly too. There is no rationale behind why boy

  Marmala Waterfall Pic by Noel Joseph Audrey Hepburn thought that a woman would grow more beautiful with age because “the beauty of a woman is not in a facial mole but … is reflected in her soul.” The caring nature is the real beauty of women, she said, and that quality only gets better as a woman ages. Passion is another aspect that makes women beautiful and age doesn’t affect that too, according to Hepburn. Marmala landscape Pic by Navya Joseph As I visited the Marmala Waterfalls in central Kerala along with a few family members this Sunday, I became acutely aware of my vanishing passions. The place had a unique charm, a pristine beauty, because it has not yet been ravaged by massive tourism. The waterfall lies tucked away in the hills which are not easily accessible. There is a very narrow road leading to it from Theekoy in Kottayam district. If another vehicle comes from the opposite direction you will need great manoeuvring skills of driving. It prompted my nephew, Noel, to r

Fiction Joe lived alone in that two-storey building which he had inherited from his parents.  His parents were no more and he was a bachelor. Then one day someone asked him whether he would let out the upper portion of his house to a young couple. Joe was not at all interested in having a young couple invading his privacy. “They won’t disturb you,” said Mathew, the acquaintance who had come with the request. “Your staircase is outside anyway.” That was not enough to convince Joe to take a couple into his house. He was not fond of people, to tell the truth. He loved to live alone. That’s why he probably didn’t even marry. But if you can get into Joe’s heart and ask the question, the heart is likely to say that Joe considered himself too young to marry. He was in his late forties, though. Age doesn’t make you old really. Look around and you will find a lot of grown-ups who are more childish than children. Nowadays children are more like adults anyway. But that’s a different matter.