Tomichan Matheikal's blog

  “If I am not I, who will be?” Philosopher Thoreau wondered. Didn’t he like himself? I wonder. Who likes himself? I ask myself with a chuckle. I don’t, at least. I never did. It’s bad strategy to admit that so loud, I know. Even if you detest yourself, never admit it openly. No one likes people who pity themselves. Self-pity destroys everything except the pathetic self. It’s better to follow the example of Thoreau and move to your private Walden and live your life as you like. People thought that Thoreau was a hypocrite because he supposedly severed ties with society and yet visited the town when he liked and visited his mother “for pie and laundry service” (Eric Weiner’s phrase). The truth is that Thoreau had never claimed that he hated society and hence wanted solitude. Thoreau, like most good people, had a fair share of crankiness. That doesn’t make him a hypocrite. In fact, he was quite a good guy whom many people didn’t understand in his time. He was a philosopher. And there

  “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly,” Antoine de Saint-Exupery says in his classical little book, The Little Prince . “What is essential is invisible to the eye.” The most vital truths are not arrived at through reason. Even philosophers need to listen to their heart, as writer Eric Weiner says in The Socrates Express . The answers of the head are not only less satisfying, says Weiner, “but, in the deepest sense, less true.” It is not clever answers that the world needs. It is authentic answers which are required. Authentic answers come from the heart. The great teachers were all people who sat with their ignorance and doubts for a long, very long while, before they arrived at answers that eventually made the world wiser. When answers of the heart are lynched, we will have a perverse nation. Too many poets and writers of India are perishing behind the bars because they looked at the reality with their hearts. In a penetrating article titled ‘ There is freedom, b

There is a romantic at sleep in my heart who likes to believe that people were better in the good old days. The people I saw as a child were much simpler than the ones I see nowadays, for example. Fifty years can make the world quite a different place. By this logic, people who lived a few centuries ago would have been very nice creatures. Well, not quite. It doesn’t work that way. People had more or less the same degree of wickedness at any time. What Jean-Paul Sartre said in 20 th century is what Marcus Aurelius said in the second century. Sartre said, “Hell is other people.” Aurelius said, “When you wake in the morning, tell yourself: the people you deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, jealous, and surly.” Even Mother Teresa, who being a saint would have been expected to foster a more generous view of human beings, seemed to think quite in the lines of Sartre and Aurelius. “People are often unreasonable, illogical and self-centred; forgive them anyway,” Mot

The best differentiation between knowledge and wisdom is given by Miles Kington, British musician. “Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit,” he said. “Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.” Wisdom is not an accumulation of knowledge, as I used to think for a long time. I kept on reading book after book on every possible topic under the sun from religion to science deluded by the hope that I would be wise one day until I realised that the semiliterate neighbour of mine whom I offered a lift once was far wiser than me though he had never read any book. What makes us happy or miserable is just a choice we make, he said when I made a snide remark on a hoarding that promised all Indians achhe din , happy days. “Knowledge is something you possess. Wisdom is something you do.” Nobody could have put it better than Eric Weiner [ The Socrates Express ]. I know that I am a silly old man on a tiny planet in a cosmos that has billions of galaxies. But I act as if I am the Lord of

  Book Review Title: Xanadu Author: Harshita Nanda Format: PDF E-book   Harshita Nanda’s novella, Xanadu , is more about a road to Xanadu than Xanadu itself. The idyl is not natural or easily available. It has to be created. It demands much agony and endurance from us. This novella is about those agonies and endurances. That is precisely what makes it enjoyable too. Utopias can’t entertain us; they can only satiate us and then leave us exhausted with ennui. The reason why there aren’t any utopias in the human world may be precisely that. We have all the potential to create utopias. But we won’t create them. In fact, if someone does create one, the others will sow the seeds of all possible vices there and kill it. That is how human nature is. All our good literature is about those vices and follies of ours. Any good novel has to end where the idyllic Xanadu begins. And that is just what happens in Harshita Nanda’s novella too. The plot revolves primarily round Anita, Bhoom

  Asharam Bhakt woke up in his dream. A figure that looked supernatural and possibly divine in spite of its resemblance to Nathuram Godse said, “Who controls the past controls the future.” The apparition vanished instantly but Asharam found himself standing in the Ambala jail where Godse was being readied for his execution. Gandhi’s killer looked scared to death. Asharam could see Godse’s knees wobbling. Is this the man who fired bullet after bullet into the frail body of a man who was uttering God’s name? Asharam wondered. Not that he had any sympathy for Mohandas Gandhi. On the contrary, he was an admirer of Godse and his advocacy of the Brahmin superiority. And all the more his hatred of Muslims. If Godse were alive today wouldn’t he be pleased to see how India has become the kind of nation that he wanted it to be: an exterminator of Muslims and slow killer of the low castes? No, Godse says to Asharam. The executioner is getting the gallows ready yonder. What! Asharam cannot

  Hamlet was a loser and a hero. Faced with a shocking evil – the murder of his father by father’s own brother who marries the victim’s wife even before the mourning is over – Hamlet wavers between violent vindictiveness and philosophical inaction. He can raise a question like “To be or not to be?” and contemplate on it endlessly when the wretched life around him demands prompt and stern action. This young man who is insistent on proving his uncle’s guilt indubitably before wreaking vengeance can be impulsive too. He can draw his sword and drive it straight into the man hiding behind a screen without even bothering to find out the man’s identity and purpose of hiding. At one moment he can address his beloved Ophelia as a fair nymph and at the next he can hurl insulting questions on to her face: “Are you honest?” “Are you fair?” Is Hamlet a real hero? He does not possess qualities that belong to people whom history venerates as heroes. Yet Hamlet has continued to enchant audiences f