Tomichan Matheikal's blog

  The family [Brownie is missing] There are 5 cats at home now - Cleopatra and her kittens. There were seven until last week. Two kittens have been adopted. So I'm left with Denny (Dennis the Menace), Dessy (Desdemona), Brownie (Elizabeth Barret Browning), and the latest arrival Nora (named after the heroine of Ibsen's A Doll's House . When I posted a pic of these cats in Facebook yesterday, a friend commented on the personality traits that differentiate cats from the very loyal canines. That comment led me to this post.  There's no comparison between cats and dogs. Cats are royal while dogs are servile. Opposite poles. Christopher Hitchens put it best when he said that if you give food and shelter to a dog, the dog will think you are god and if you do the same to a cat, the cat will think it is god. If you want to hear it a little more comically, here is Bill Dana (American comedian): " I had been told that the training procedure with cats was difficult. It’s not.

  Catholics protesting Muslim protest ( New Indian Express ) A century and a quarter ago, Swami Vivekananda described Kerala as a madhouse. The inhuman horrors perpetrated in the name of religious castes prompted the sage to use that analogy. The people of Kerala were openminded enough to listen to the verdict passed by a voice of sanity. Swami Vivekananda led Kerala to introspection and subsequent reformation. The brutalities of religion gave way to the humaneness of a new civilisation in Kerala. It is this same Kerala that stands on the brink of a communal clash now because of a thoughtless statement made by a bishop . The Muslims took out a protest march to the Bishop’s House a day after the puerile statement was made by the bishop. The Muslim ire was understandable. No one will like to hear his entire community being labelled as terrorists and criminals because of a minority of such people in the community. A day after the Muslim rally, the Catholics in the area took out a pr

  God's wrath on WTC On this day 20 years ago, four airplanes were hijacked by 19 men who then flew them straight into certain symbols of modern civilisation: the twin towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The Capitol was targeted too but the guy who flew that fourth plane missed: his God was not happy with him, perhaps. It was all done for God. One man called Osama bin Laden decided that his God was not happy with the “unjust, criminal and tyrannical” America. So he killed 2977 innocent people some of whom were in those buildings which came tumbling down and others were in the planes hijacked by his warriors. The youngest victim was Christine Lee Hanson, a two-year-old child travelling with her parents. The oldest was 82-year-old Robert Norton who was going with his wife to attend a wedding. Innocent people. As innocent as a two-year-old is. And as innocent as an 82-year-old is when it comes to the vengeance of gods. Are the gods really hungry for the blood of C

  Adrienne Rich [1929-2012] This is the last of a three-part series on gender discrimination. The first two parts [ Women in Indian Democracy and Gender bias in a land of goddesses ] touched upon certain aspects of the discrimination in India. This concluding part looks at the issue from a wider perspective with a feminist poem as the substratum. Adrienne Rich’s poem Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers presents an old lady who has been oppressed by a patriarchal system. She is an unhappy wife and hence, obviously, an unhappy woman. Her discontentment is caused by her husband who put the “massive weight” of the wedding ring on Aunt’s finger. From the day that ring was slipped on, Aunt has been “mastered” by “ordeals”. The poem was written in 1951. America, Rich’s country, wasn’t quite progressive yet in those days especially in matters related to women’s liberties. All women were expected to marry soon after school and live a life of subordination.   Even a faint suggestion of divorce would

  Less than one-third of the researchers are women in the world. In India, the percentage of women researchers is a meagre 13. There are hardly any women in the higher echelons of research institutions. In the four major government institutions that fund research – Department of Science and Technology, Department of Biotechnology, Department of Earth Science, and CSIR – only twice has a woman become a secretary. AIIMS and Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) have had only one woman director each so far. A few studies done on this problem identify two chief reasons: (1) the appointing committees are male-dominated and biased; (2) household responsibilities which, in India, are conventionally laid on women’s shoulders almost entirely. Well-known novelist Anita Desai made some very interesting observations about Indian attitude towards women [‘A Secret Connivance’ in The Times Literary Supplement in 1990]. It’s worth reading it in her own words: One form of imprisonment in I

  From agropedia India has seldom been generous towards its womenfolk. In 1990 Amartya Sen spoke about the scandalising number of missing women in India because of the Indian preference for male children. Soon researchers estimated that more than 65 million women were missing from the country’s population. In such a country where women are not even allowed to be born, or not allowed to grow up after birth, what is women’s status in electoral politics? The first answer is that the political system is skewed in favour of men if only because the absence of 65 million voters translates as 20 percent of the country’s missing electorate. The situation has continued to be worrisome for years. Last year UNFPA’s State of the World Population report said that one in three girls missing globally due to sex selection, both pre- and post-natal, is from India. That’s tragically ironic for a country which creates new slogans for women’s security year after year. What comes as a consolation is

  Some days have begun to look utterly washed out. When the current pandemic broke out, there was the hope that it would be brought under control soon. Our medical science is so advanced, isn’t it? When the first wave gave way to the second, I hoped it was sort of an anticlimax, one of those many cruel jokes that life loves to play and jokes don’t last long. But it hasn’t ended with the second wave either. Life is slipping out like the effluence from a drab industry. The weekend travels came to an end long ago. Too many books and too much TV have begun to taste sour. The online classes are threatening to get into a mundane rut. The mind refuses to think sometimes. Dreams died a pretty while ago without even leaving traces. It’s then someone from the parish church called on Sunday, as part of a survey, to ask what my opinion was about rebuilding the chapel [ kurisupalli ] of the parish. I didn’t want to be asked such opinions since I hardly associate myself with religions. I tol