Tomichan Matheikal's blog

  Pic courtesy Pikrepo Somewhere in the arid landscape of the Rann of Kutch, the midnight’s full moon cast two shadows on the salty sands. The shadows were walking in opposite directions, one in the direction of Hindustan and the other in that of Pakistan. They met each other on the way. A woman all alone in this ghostly land! The male shadow felt a shiver slipping into the marrow of his bones. The female shadow was even more scared but did not reveal her scare. The man could not but look into the face of the woman. She looked so beautiful in that radiant moonlight. Beauty was irresistible for him, especially feminine beauty, because he was a writer by profession. Beauty stopped, stared into the eyes of the man fiercely and asked in an affected voice, “Can you really see me?” She intended to scare him away by making him believe that she was a ghost. The man was not only a writer but had also dabbled in psychology as an undergrad of the Kerala University before he was hijack

  A cemetery in central Kerala If I were one of those Midnight’s children – i.e., born when the country’s first Prime Minister was redeeming its age-old tryst with destiny from the ramparts of the Red Fort – I would have been dead three decades now. The average life expectancy in India was 32 years in 1947. That wasn’t too bad. Most countries did not fare much better. The average life expectancy calculated for the world until 1900 was just 32. By the time India extricated itself from the British rule, the figure improved in many countries. The Covid pandemic has made me increasingly conscious of death. Just the other day an acquaintance of mine passed away due to heart attack. He was a successful man by all normal standards: a professor in a college that paid the UGC scale to the staff. He was just 52 when death claimed him during sleep. A day after that death, a 16-year-old student of mine gave me a call to ask whether she could do her English project on how certain people coped

  Arthur James Balfour took a land belonging to one people and gave it to another people just by signing a declaration in 1917. Those were the days when the British Empire behaved as if the whole earth belonged to it. The Jews were just 7% of Palestine’s population in 1917. Today that country belongs to Jews and its original inhabitants have been pushed into destitution. The recent bout of violence between the Israeli Jews and the Palestinian Arabs prompted me to read up their stories. I bought two books, one written by Western writers and the other by a Palestinian though he was born in America. Peter Mansfield’s book is a classical history of the Middle East originally written in 1991. The edition I have is one that was updated by Nicolas Pelham in 2019. The introductory chapter of this book gives us a glimpse into the history of the Middle East from the ancient days up to the Ottoman Empire. The very opening sentence of Chapter 2 is: “At the end of the eighteenth century, the

  Makarand Paranjape Makarand Paranjape is a scared man, apparently. His article in today’s New Indian Express [ Hatred of Hindutva may lead to Hindumisia ] reveals him as a man with wobbling knees. He is scared to his solar plexus that the whole world is smitten by hatred of Hindus so much so that soon India will have to face Hinducide. Hindumisia is a new word for me, the only thing I learnt from Paranjape’s article. Paranjape claims to be a scholar, academician, and a poet, “with a track-record of over 40 years of university teaching all over the world”. I read some of his poems three decades ago as part of a literature course. He didn’t strike me then as a poet worth reading except for completing the course. I never read him once the course was over until his occasional articles in the above-mentioned newspaper began to disturb me. I don’t know why this old man should be scared to his bones just because some unknown outfit is organising a conference on Hindutva somewhere in

  Sri Narayan Guru “Aaron, dear!”  The glimmer that characterised Andrews’ eyes was accentuated as he smiled through the long beard that made him look more like a Hindu sage than a Christian priest.  “You want to convert the Indians to Christianity.  But I’ve seen our Christ walking on the shores of the Arabian ocean wearing the robe of a Hindu sage.”  He described his meeting with Sri Narayana Guru, the Jesus in Travancore.  He spoke about Tagore and Ambedkar.  Aaron was already aware of Gandhi. “It is not the Indians who need our light,” concluded Andrews.  “We stand in need of their light.” Aaron was scandalised and did not conceal his feeling. “We have this silly notion of life as a series of sins and God as the all-forgiving father waiting for the prodigal sons to return home begging for forgiveness.  You are going to a country whose scriptures do not differentiate between God and human beings.  Aham Brahmasmi, I am God, they say.” The above passage is extracted from my

  From the last Onam celebration in my school [2019] Maveli being escorted to the pavilion Five Onams ago, Amit Shah made a terrible mistake by wishing the people of Kerala on the occasion of Onam referring to the festival as Vamana Jayanti. Vamana Jayanti is the victory of Vamana. The victory of Vamana was the rout of Kerala’s most loved king, Maveli, whom Onam celebrates. Amit Shah’s greeting revealed his ignorance of Kerala’s version of Indian mythology. Otherwise, it revealed the arch politician’s quintessential villainy of surreptitiously trying to erase Kerala’s version which is diametrically opposed to the North Indian one when it comes to the Maveli-Vamana purana. For the uninitiated, Maveli is the Malayalam version of Bali who was an Asura king, an antigod (or a demon in the older translations). The Rig Veda, the Brahmanas, and the Ramayana all have slightly different versions of the Bali story. In the Rig Veda, Vishnu (whose incarnation is Vamana) takes three steps and

  Cashew tree in love with my house Black ants laid siege to my house. Tiny, almost atomic, creatures. Suddenly they were there wherever I looked. In endless lines they marched like devoted soldiers conquering an enemy’s territory. I had no choice but raise jingoistic slogans and pull out some AK-47s. I drew Lakshman Rekhas all over with Hit chalk. I sprayed Hit Lime Fresh wherever Maggie permitted me. [She detests the smell of chemicals.] Hoards of black specks stared at me soon from the floor. Dead ants. Within hours of my cleaning up the entire place, new lines of ants appeared exactly in the same old places. The same infinite black lines moving like endless trains. Finally I traced their origins to two sources: my beloved cashew tree in front of the house and the ivy gourd behind. The ants were descending on to the walls of my house from these. I chopped off the cashew branches that touched my roof. I cut off the ivy gourd which had become too old to produce anything except bla