Tomichan Matheikal's blog

  An outlier is an outstanding person. He does not belong to the herd because of certain qualitative characteristics like exceptional intellect or skill in a particular domain. Albert Einstein was an outlier, for example. Leonardo da Vinci, another example. Carl Sagan, yet another. Outliers stand out of the herd like a tall oak in a forest. Is it some genetic factor that shapes the outlier? Is his exceptional quality inborn? Well, not entirely. The tallest oak has its origin in a quality acorn, no doubt. But there are many other factors that contributed towards its healthy growth like availability of sunlight (no other trees blocked it), deep and rich soil, and not being espied by a lumberjack. Bill Gates wouldn’t have reached where he did unless his parents provided the conducive environment for his growth and development. When they realised that young Bill was getting bored of his school, they took him out and sent him to Lakeside, a private school that catered to the elite fam

  “The offence of sedition cannot be invoked to minister to the wounded vanity of the governments,” declared the judge who granted bail to 22-year-old Disha Ravi recently. Disha was arrested on charges of sedition. She was supposedly working with Greta Thunberg to undermine the Indian government! The only thing that she did which provoked the government was to support the enduring farmers’ agitation. Disha is just one among hundreds of people being victimised in India merely because they have wounded the vanity of the government. The vanity of the present Indian government comes from what psychology and philosophy call naïve realism. Naïve realism is the belief that one’s view of events is unbiased and correct and when others disagree they must be wrong. Naïve realists assume that those who disagree with them are uninformed, irrational and biased. A whole lot of politicians in the ruling party in India now seem to be naïve realists with vanities wounded by the ghosts of history.

  People call him Switch. Most of them probably don’t know what his real name is. At least none of those whom I asked knew it for sure. But everyone knew that he was a murderer. He had killed his own brother. I know Switch from the time I came to live in Kerala six years ago. He worked for my brother. Most of the time he reeked of cheap brandy or palm toddy. One of his usual haunts is the toddy shop that is half a kilometre from the school where I teach. The bifurcation of the road towards my school is a 90 degree turn just near the toddy bar. My car invariably slows down at the turn and Switch would be there sometimes waiting to hitch a ride. I never refused him though I knew he was a murderer whose case was in the court. He would speak something silly and the stench of toddy would nauseate the air in the car. Otherwise he was just another innocuous villager. A few weeks back he came to me, “Sir, give me hundred rupees.” “Aren’t you working today?” I asked hinting that he should

There were intelligent seekers of truth even in India as far back in history as seventh century BCE. One such school was Charvaka whose doctrine was known as Lokayata. Very little information about them has survived to our day. No copy of their central text, the Brihaspati Sutra, which dates from 600 BCE, is available now. It is assumed by historians that the Lokayata texts were systematically destroyed by the Brahmins whose authority was questioned by these texts. But, rather ironically, the works which argued against the Lokayata texts were preserved and thus we have sufficient information about this rebellious doctrine. The adherents of this doctrine, the Charvakas, rejected life after death. They considered such beliefs funny. Thinking and feeling are part of our physical system and in the due course of time they wear out and die. Nothing is left to live on after death. The ancient play, The Rise of the Moon Intellect , has a character who ridicules religious believers as “unci

  The world in Kafka’s fiction is a veritable prison in which you are not free though you are allowed the illusion of being free. As the police Inspector tells the protagonist of The Trial , “You are under arrest, certainly, but that need not hinder you from going about your business. You won’t be hampered in carrying on in the ordinary course of your life.” Carry on in the ordinary course of your life. Eat, sleep, mate, and do some job like all other normal people. That is the ordinary course of life. If you dare to do more than that, the authorities will tell you in no uncertain terms that you are crossing your limits. What are those limits, however? Kafka does not make it clear. His protagonists fight invisible forces. The so-called authority lies beyond the reach of the ordinary mortals in Kafka’s world. In The Trial , for example, it is the Law that determines the protagonist’s fate. What is the Law, however? Joseph, the protagonist of The Trial , admits his ignorance of t

  Human beings have infinite ways of deluding themselves. ‘Just-world bias’ is just one of them. It is the belief that we live in a just world which rewards us for our good deeds and punishes for the evil ones. In other words, we believe that there is a moral order in the world or the universe by which our actions merit just consequences. You get what you deserve. What you reap is what you sowed. What goes around comes around. Karma. Most religions believe in the just-world concept in one form or another. In religions, a god or some divine entity controls this system. Many people who are not religious believe in a universal force that maintains this moral balance. The naked truth is that there is no such force or divine entity dishing out justice to us from somewhere out there. The death of an innocent child due to a pandemic alone should be enough to make us realise that the heavens are not a bit as fair as we would wish them to be. We can choose to hoodwink ourselves with beliefs

  Lewis Terman is a psychologist who put a high premium on intelligence. “There is nothing about an individual as important as his IQ, except possibly his morals,” he declared fervidly. He carried out a lifelong research on certain highly gifted children continuously until they grew up into adulthood. His research is the longest-lasting longitudinal study ever conducted. In 1921, Terman sent a team of fieldworkers to California’s elementary and high schools with the mission of finding out the brightest students. Intelligence tests were conducted on the students suggested by the teachers. The top ten percent of the candidates were given another IQ test. Those who scored above 130 in that second test were administered a third test. Thus Terman selected the most intelligent students of California, no less than 1470 of them. These students, who came to be known as Termites, were monitored constantly as they grew up. They were tested at regular intervals, the results were analysed, and