Tomichan Matheikal's blog

  One of the most interesting articles I read yesterday is from a Malayalam monthly, Bhashaposhini . The article is a glorious tribute to a Malayalam writer named V B C Nair. What I loved about the article are the profound insights it gives into the lives of some great writers of Kerala. When we read the works of these writers, we admire them. We admire the stories they weave, the characters they etch into our memories, the themes they leave us thinking about, and so on. We would imagine these writers as superhuman entities living beyond the normal human follies and foibles that punctuate the lives of silly people like me and the guy next door. This Bhashaposhini article reveals – rather unwittingly, I feel –the very human side of some great Malayalam writers. Let me take only one example. The motive is not to highlight the dark side of this eminent personality. I have been fascinated by a thought that recurs these days to me like a motif in a novel. The great writers know so much

  My old thesaurus One of the oldest books in my present collection is Roget’s Thesaurus . I bought this book in the Christmas season of 1975. One of my teachers bought it for me as well as a few other students who wanted it. The book was my faithful companion for many years because I was in love with words. The art of writing has little to do with a thesaurus. But I realised that truth much later. Initially I laboured under the delusion that writing was a kind of verbal jugglery. My appetite for words was ravenous for quite a few years and I employed bombastic words in my writing in those days. Somebody compared me to Mrs Malaprop and somebody gave me the nickname ‘Thesaurus Man’. Eventually I was enlightened. It dawned on me that writing wasn’t quite about words. Of course, if you can use words elegantly and appropriately that’s a great advantage in writing. But writing isn’t all about such elegance or appropriateness. Writing is essentially a form of self-expression. It does

  The Chinese Communist Party is celebrating the centenary of its foundation.   The word ‘Communist’ stands out like a grotesque phantom because China is a capitalist empire today and has nothing to do with communism. It has emerged as the only viable rival to the United States of America as a global superpower. It has gone one step too many ahead of Uncle Sam in oppressing large sections of people like in Tibet and Hong Kong. In spite of all that, India can learn some lessons from China. The use of science and technology for the maximum benefit of its people is the first lesson that India should learn from China. Take just one example: the high-speed railways. China started construction of high-speed railway only in 2007. In about a decade it developed 37,900 km of high-speed rails, more than two-thirds of the entire world’s share in that transport medium. The country also has bullet trains that run at the speed of 600 km/hour. Eradication of poverty is another matter that dese

Arthur Schopenhauer Human society is no fun. Solitude is worse. Philosopher Schopenhauer called that situation the ‘Porcupine Dilemma’. Imagine some porcupines struggling to stay warm on a cold winter night. The closer you get to each other, the warmer it is. How close can porcupines get to each other? Their quills protect them from external harms. Societal harms, shall we call them? The same quills prevent them from coming closer and sharing the body warmth. That is what Schopenhauer called the porcupine dilemma. You need others to survive. But others can hurt you. They will , in all probability. When I read about this dilemma in an essay on Schopenhauer by Eric Weiner, two thoughts hit my brain simultaneously. One, how do porcupines mate? They don’t pollinate, obviously. Two, how close did Schopenhauer get to other people? The pollination dilemma of porcupines was solved easily as far as I was concerned. I learnt that the female of the species went an extra mile to make the p

  “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