Tomichan Matheikal's blog

 Sunday musings Image from panna.org In the classical story, the vainglorious emperor is naked though he is made to believe that he is wearing some supernatural fabric. The King in this blog post is blessed with the same vanity though he cannot be accused of the same naivete. His sartorial sense is as sophisticated as his political acumen is shrewd. He has his own brand of jackets with colours that match the occasions. His words have colours that match the occasions. He can be a teacher or a butcher, a persuasive demagogue or a deferential tea-seller. He longs for appreciation from the very people whom he holds in contempt. He emulates the people whom he seeks to displace from history. He professes absolute love for his country and its ancient culture and civilisation. But he will get foreign writers to pen his biography. Andy Marino and Lance Price have written voluminous books about his greatness though they knew him little until they were hired to do the job. Knowledge is no

  A church in a village in Kerala The best definition of ‘faith’ I’ve come across so far is Ambrose Bierce’s: “Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge of things without parallel.” What does the word ‘faith’ mean to me? This is the question raised by fellow blogger, Parwati Singari , at a blogger’s community for this week’s discussion. The word ‘Faith’ is primarily associated with religions and gods . There are other meanings too, of course, like in ‘I have no faith in my government’ or ‘You’ll cope – I have great faith in you.’ I stick to the primary connotation here. The first thing I did when I saw Parwati’s topic was to take once again The Scale of Doubt Quiz given in the opening pages of Jennifer Michael Hecht’s scintillating work, Doubt: a history . [In case you wish to take the same quiz and see how much of a believer you are, I’ve posted a pic of the page from Hecht’s book in my Facebook timeline .] My result: I am an atheist, but I “may

  “The ideas by which a ruling group maintains its power must be suited to the intellectual climate of the given epoch.” Barrows Dunham, 20 th century American philosopher who was fired from Temple University for being “un-American” in his thoughts, wrote that in his famous book Man Against Myth (1947). There is a close affinity between the intellectual levels of a people and their rulers. There was a time when religion was the most powerful social entity among people and hence rulers claimed to possess divine rights to rule. Ancient kings worked in collusion with priests. Both together exploited the ordinary people mercilessly. Since the people also believed in the same gods that the kings and the priests did, the system worked. But that changed when people realised that the gods weren’t exactly what they seemed to be. The rulers who once derived their power from the gods were now content to derive it from monkeys, as Dunham put it. Charles Darwin usurped the power of the gods a

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