Tomichan Matheikal's blog

  My own lane It took me a while to realise that I was in the wrong lane and fatally so. All the headlights were rushing straight into my eyes and one of the drivers shouted an expletive too. It was sometime in the 1990s. I was on my Yamaha 100cc, returning home after a visit to an acquaintance who lived on one of the many remote cliffs of the little hill town of Shillong. The acquaintance had directed me on a shortcut. Shortcuts abound in the hills. And the shortcuts on the hills can be particularly tricky. It was thus that I emerged from the shortcut on the wrong side of the highway in Laitumkhrah. Those were days when my life was running downhill with greater acceleration than the usual free falls have. Later on I wondered time and again about what would have happened had I been killed that evening. Nothing. People would have come to the natural conclusion that a drunken man was driving madly on the wrong side. A natural end to an aberration. Frankly, I don’t know whether an e

  Nietzsche Philosopher Nietzsche saw a man whipping a horse on a street in Turin, Italy. He couldn’t endure the cruel sight. Rushing towards the animal, the philosopher hugged it before collapsing to the ground. He never regained his sanity after that. Nietzsche despised weakness and sentimentality. He was a social Darwinist who believed in the right of the fittest to survive. Strength is the ultimate virtue, he said, and weakness is a vice. Goodness is that which wins while the bad yields to pressure and perishes. This philosopher of strength who counselled people to live dangerously and to erect their cities beside fuming volcanos and to send out their ships to unexplored seas could not bear the sight of a horse being whipped by its owner. That was Nietzsche: a bundle of paradoxes. He did not even possess basic health. He was a sickly person right from childhood and he possessed all the goody-goodiness of such boys. As a little boy, he detested the “bad boys” of his neighbou

  The book I’m now reading is Eric Weiner’s The Socrates Express . [Waiting in line next is Rutger Bregman’s Hopeful History of Humankind , suggested by blogger-friend Yamini MacLean .] Weiner has taken pretty much of my time already. An attack of Covid-19 kept me in bed for nearly a week and I couldn’t read anything serious, much as I longed to. Moreover, you can’t just skim through Weiner in spite of his apparently light style. The lightness is only apparent. He demands serious reading. The book is a collection of essays on philosophers from Marcus Aurelius to Simone de Beauvoir. I loved each one of them. Each one begins with a title How to … ‘How to wonder like Socrates,’ for example. ‘How to fight like Gandhi’ lies exactly in the centre of the book, 8 th out of 14 chapters. Appropriate place, I thought. Gandhi deserves the centre-stage especially these days when his country is driven by the opposite of all that he stood for, lived for, and died for. Gandhi was a fighter. Inj

Appu Garh, Jan 2001   Memories can sustain us. They can also kill us slowly.  Shillong and Delhi are memories for me now. I lived in both places for a decade and a half each. The first was hell for me and the second was my paradise on earth.  I visited Delhi for the first time in the winter of 2000-2001 along with Maggie. We were on a holiday from Shillong which had become an agony for us both. The very next summer found us both seeking jobs in Delhi. We had given up our jobs in Shillong. We had given up Shillong.  Looking back at any reality two decades later has certain dangers. The past is never a fixed entity in our memories. The past is as much in a state of flux as is the present. The past keeps changing to suit our present. We need that transmogrification for our own survival. How else would certain events of the past become bearable? More than 20 years after I left Shillong, the place still remains as a festering wound somewhere in my psyche. That is how certain memories are. T

 I have never been a fan of medicines except when I broke my bones. The pain of broken bones is not quite pleasant and you need a technician to set the broken pieces together in harmony once again. And you need painkillers. Covid-19 confined me to a hospital bed in the last four days. I shouldn't have gone to hospital in the first place. I should have just contented myself with the medicines given by my neighbourhood hospital. But I had a slight breathing problem in the night which refused to subside with my usual dose of Asthalin. So I thought of seeking technical assistance. You don't feel like taking too many risks when you've crossed the age of 60.  The amount of medicines that the nurse put out on the table for me to consume each morning, noon, and evening threw me into a bout of depression. There was just one tab alone, Flavipiravir, that would fill my belly with all its 1800 milligrams in weight, apart from half a dozen others which were mercifully lightweight champi

  Image from here When French philosopher and Nobel Laureate, Jean-Paul Sartre, wrote that hell is other people , he didn’t mean that Hell had become full and the devils had started spilling out on to the earth. He meant we are the devils. We are the devils to one another. “When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth,” says a character in a Hollywood movie (if I remember correctly). This is the theme for this week’s Indispire . Is Hell really overflowing? This is a question that struck me recently when I read about how my compatriots behave these days towards fellow human beings in the name of weird ideology (which is in practice a ploy for grabbing whatever wealth is left with the minority communities and Dalits). But I know that it’s not the ghosts of the dead that walk around here now raping and killing little children, assaulting people in the name of non-existent spirits, spending enormous amounts on concrete structures some of which will do no good to anyo

 Modi's cabinet reshuffle was followed almost instantly by some very interesting cartoons and other reactions on social media. Here are a few selected ones.  And the next comes from The Hindu .