Tomichan Matheikal's blog

  Each one of us carries within ourselves a child who is confused, angry, hurt, and longs for recognition. The degree of the confusion, anger and hurt will obviously vary from individual to individual. Instead of coming to terms with that inner child, instead of dealing maturely and intelligently with the anger and/or other states of emotion, we let them be. We get on with life. We are experts at it. At getting on. That is easier to do than deal with our deeper personal problems. It is easy to surrender to the demands of the world around us and go on. No strife. It is easy to live up to what is expected of us at the workplace, in the society, even at home, and move on. No quarrels. We get on apparently smoothly with priorities defined by others. How long? Maybe till the end of our life. Many people manage that. They are only half alive. They have killed a part of themselves for the sake of peace with others. Turn a blind eye to unpleasant realities. Create darkness by shutting your

  Though happiness is the ideal that we all love to chase, the fact remains that sorrow is the solid underpinning of human reality. There is no life without a touch of grief. The possibility of failure lurks at every bend along the road. There is no mountain, however alluring it is, without its due share of boulders and ravines that impede your progress upward. Certain truths are painful but also inevitable. You can’t avoid them. You can’t escape them. For example, the truth that most people won’t understand you when you desperately need to be understood. There are times when you wish that at least your spouse understood you better. Your best friend will ditch you when you most need help. Have you ever noticed that loneliness is a universal phenomenon? You can feel lonely in the middle of a party. The realisation that the other people are grappling with their own shame and sorrow must have hit you like an enlightenment more than once. These are just a few examples. There are other

  Who doesn’t want to be better and better? Self-improvement books sell in millions. Pop preachers and cult gurus attract hundreds of thousands of wellness-seekers. Most of us want to be better than what we are. Psychologically better if not in many other ways too. Self-improvement is not all that easy, however. We have deeply entrenched tendencies to shut our ears to all major truths about our real selves. That is why self-improvement is not easy. We would prefer to do almost anything other than take in information that can save us. We will climb tough peaks by way of pilgrimages in order to save ourselves. We will fast and do penance. Attend workshops and webinars. Join laughter clubs and listen to podcasts from masters. The path to self-improvement is tough, painful. In order to improve ourselves, we need first of all confront our fears about ourselves, our deepest selves. We need to stand face to face with our inner demons. The demons of jealousy and greed, lust for power and

  It was by sheer chance I met Sri Hanuman ji at the junction where history turned into many diversions. It wasn’t at all easy to recognise him since he had a mask on to protect himself from the overenthusiastic Kerala Police that impose heavy fines on people without masks. The Kerala government’s revenue was limited severely by the closure of liquor outlets and the lottery business. Mercifully, the central government kept on increasing the prices of petrol and diesel everyday like a sacred ritual so that the SGST kept coming in. Without that, what would the State do? Beg from Delhi? That would be of no use because Delhi was an alien capital these days with Lutyens’ history being rewritten by roaring earth movers. Aryan pride was wiping out both British and Mughal symbols from Bharatvarsha. It was not just the mask that made it difficult to recognise Hanuman ji. He had no tail. I asked him about that. “I never had a tail, man,” he said. “That tail was an honour added by Valmiki j

  Salman Rushdie grew up kissing books and bread before he could ever kiss a girl. The writer says that in his essay, ‘Is Nothing Sacred?’. It was a tradition in his household to pick up and kiss any food item or book that was dropped by mistake. “Bread and books: food for the body and food for the soul – what could be more worthy of our respect, and even love?” He asks. What can be more sacred than food and books? Trust. That is my answer to Rushdie’s question. I hold trust above everything else. Have you ever noticed that it is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend? That is because the enemy does not betray trust. The friend does. Trust is the very foundation of human relationships. Psychologist Erik Erikson places trust at the threshold of our psychological wellbeing. A person’s whole outlook is determined by the trust she is able to develop as she grows up and that ability to trust is built or crushed in the earliest days of childhood. A baby that receives prope

  The Dream of a Ridiculous Man is a short story by Dostoevsky. The narrator-protagonist is a total misfit in the human world. “Oh, how hard it is to be the only one who knows the truth!” He reflects. The truth he knows makes him a ridiculous man first and later a mad man. He knows that human life is absurd. That is the truth he knows. He is incapable of loving that life. He cannot accept the normal human jealousies, greed, mendacity, and so on. He is utterly frustrated and wants to kill himself. He buys a revolver and wants to fire the bullet right into his brain. One day, while walking towards home in the night contemplating suicide, a little girl of eight tugs at his elbow frantically. The girl’s mother is in some danger and wants urgent help. The girl looks absolutely miserable wearing tattered clothes and torn shoes. The protagonist does not feel any sympathy for the girl. He pushes the girl away and walks off. At home, the girl rises in his consciousness. He wonders why

  Image from ShutterStock Historically a pandemic has 3 types of ends. One, medical end which implies that the disease does not spread any more. Two, social end which happens when life returns to normal. And the last is political which is decided by the government.   Obviously, it is the first kind that matters. And that end seems quite distant as of now. There is a lot of movement of people even now, including international journeys. That makes it a big challenge for medical science to contain the virus. People will have to acquire natural immunity to the virus if a medical end to the pandemic has to arrive. The vaccines are meant to bring about that immunity. Some may develop immunity by contracting the disease and overcoming it. A few may develop the immunity internally. There is also the possibility of the virus weakening due to various reasons and eventually disappearing. Science has observed that the rate at which a pandemic moves towards its peak is the same as the rate of