Tomichan Matheikal's blog

  Image from The Guardian The problem with organisations like the Taliban and the Sri Rama Sena or Bajrang Dal is that they make choices for everyone in the country. The Taliban decides what the people of Afghanistan will wear, eat, learn, etc. The myriad right-wing organisations in India make similar choices for Indians though they haven’t yet reached the extremes of the Taliban. They will. It’s just a matter of time. Once the descent begins, it gathers momentum more rapidly than you imagine. All degeneration is like the avalanche: small beginning and disastrous ending. Who wants to make decisions for everyone in the country? Who decides what everyone should wear, eat, drink, which god they will worship, which language they will speak, who they will love or hate? The answer is obvious. Only those who think they possess all truths can make such choices for everyone. The Taliban think they are the custodians of all the essential truths. One such essential truth is that the televis

  "You need to have a fundamental assumption that either the people are essentially good or they are evil," my colleague and a sociology lecturer counselled me. I was in my late thirties and struggling with a protracted depression. He was giving me a choice between Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.  Hobbes believed that human nature was fundamentally wicked. Without the rigours of the law, we would all be self-centred savages. Rousseau, on the other hand, declared that in our heart of hearts we are all good. If civilisation was the redeeming force for Hobbes, the same civilisation ruined people in Rousseau's philosophy. Man is born free and good but the institutions of civilisation enslave him everywhere, Rousseau wrote.  I chose Rousseau when my counsellor-friend demanded. The events that had led to my depression had made me feel that I was the only worthless creature in the whole cosmos. I had become the metaphorical drum in the marketplace. Everyone who passed b

  From DDA Park, INA, Delhi Half of our rulers in the Lok Sabha are notorious criminals. 233 of them are facing serious charges like murder, rape, and kidnapping. The case in the Rajya Sabha is not very encouraging either. One-fourth of them are deadly criminals. It is in that house of criminals that Venkaiah Naidu wept the other day saying that the opposition protests had sullied the sanctity of the house. My impulsive reaction as I listened to the news and watched Mr Naidu sobbing like an innocent girl was a mirthful laugh. I had never laughed so heartily for a long time. “Sacredness destroyed,” I repeat his words and cannot control my loud amusement. “If they are sacred, then what are we?” I ask Maggie who is watching the TV too. “Gods?” Maggie is silent. She is an ideal citizen unlike me. The number of criminals in the Parliament went on increasing election after election. It was 162 in the 2009 Lok Sabha and 185 in 2014. 233 now. And remember that these numbers refer to th

I have seen many parents of my students staring at me with unconcealed scepticism when I tell them that their son or daughter is going to score very high in the final exam. “But she never opens the English textbooks,” once a mother told me with palpable vexation. “I am her textbook,” I said with my usual serene smile, “leave it to me.” The mother didn’t know what to say and she left looking rather unhappy. When the final result came, her daughter had scored 96%, one mark more than I had predicted for her. This happened in an early period of service at my present school. Now most parents know I mean what I say and they don’t stare anymore. Most of my students score enviably high marks in the final exam. How do I do it? I didn’t know until yesterday that my strategy had an official name in psychology: the Pygmalion Effect. You put your trust in a person’s merits, tell him that he has the potential to achieve such and such, and support him as and when required. You will get the resu

  The complimentary copies of my first book arrived just one day before I took a leap into the dark at the age of 41. It was the summer of 2001. I had quit my job at St Edmund’s College, Shillong and had packed my little belongings. A colleague from Edmund’s came in the evening with a packet that had been delivered at the college address. Four copies of English Poetry: From John Donne to Ted Hughes , my first book. I took it as a good omen though I was battling the most protracted depression of my life. That book had a tragic history. I had done a lot of research before writing it. But all through those months of research I was treated by my colleagues like a mental retard with an ethereal ambition or something like that. Edmund’s was my hell. It scorched my very soul. Purification before you enter heaven. Delhi turned out to be my heaven. Strange things happen in life. I have narrated all those strange things of my life in Autumn Shadows . I wrote many books after English Poetry

  India's status in the Freedom Report India is set to celebrate its 75 th Independence Day amid a pandemic that seems determined to teach the world certain lessons. One of the first lessons that India should learn at this juncture is the meaning of freedom. As long as every citizen is not free – free from poverty, superstition, illiteracy, ignorance, and other such evils – the country’s independence from a foreign rule cannot make much sense. That was the firm opinion of the father of the nation, Mahatma Gandhi. Freedom, in other words, is not mere political freedom. Freedom is personal, highly so. It is this personal freedom that is being killed brutally by the present dispensation in Delhi. Narendra Modi has created an India that the is the exact opposite of what Gandhi had envisaged. The transition from Gandhi’s mystic vision to Modi’s cabalistic vision is total now. Even international observers have made detailed studies about it and put out reports. Freedom House is

  It is sheer coincidence that the potential goodness of the human race is the theme common to the book I am now reading and TJS George’s weekly column in The New Sunday Express . The book is Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: A hopeful history , which I mentioned a number of times in earlier posts. The book is taking more time than usual to complete for two reasons: 1. I like the book and hence I read it slowly savouring the thoughts it offers; 2. CBSE has made quite many changes in the curriculum and they keep me engaged most of the time. Bregman seems to be an incorrigible optimist. But George is certainly not that. No journalist in India can be so optimistic. Optimism dies in India’s corridors of power, whether in the parliament or in the state assemblies. George concludes his cheery column on a cynical note suggesting that Derek O’Brien’s [a Rajya Sabha MP] comparison of Modi’s governance to the making of papri chaat is “unfair to papari chaat .” George’s entire article is about s