Tomichan Matheikal's blog

  “Prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.” The narrator-protagonist of Mark Haddon’s novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time , makes that captivating observation. 15-year-old Christopher loves numbers and has a way with them. For example, ask him ‘What’s 251 times 864?’ and he’ll tell you in a moment the answer: 216,864. It’s easy, he will tell you, you just multiply 864 x 1000 which is 864,000. Then you divide it by 4 which is 216,000 and that’s 250 x 864. Then you just add another 864 on to it to get 251 x 864. And that’s 216,864. He’s good at science too. What he’s not good at is understanding people. People are more complicated than maths and science. They tell lies. They have complex emotions and motives. And beliefs. Christopher tells us that he cannot tell lies, ‘not because I am a good person. It is because I can’t tell lies.’ His mind is too logical t

  Book Review Title: The Murderer, The Monarch and The Fakir Authors: Appu Eldhose Suresh & Priyanka Kotamraju Publisher: Harper Collins, 2021. Pages: 234 Can both Mahatma Gandhi and his murderer Nathuram Godse be national heroes? The ruling party, BJP, is attempting to yoke the two together. Recently the Home Minister, Rajnath Singh, tried to get the Mahatma’s support for Godse’s guru, V D Savarkar. But his statement was soon proved to be yet another roguish attempt by the BJP to falsify history. There was nothing in common between Savarkar’s allies and Gandhi. More importantly, Savarkar and his allies conspired again and again to murder Gandhi who was antinational in their perception. The chief contention of the book under review is that Godse was just one of the many assassins of Gandhi, Savarkar being a major figure in the group of conspirators. The authors of this book unearth information from previously unseen intelligence reports and police records to show how th

  When someone put up a spoof on the protagonist of the Drishyam movie in a WhatsApp group of some family members, I commented to ask whether the name of the protagonist has become synonymous with crookedness. One member, whose father’s name is the same as the protagonist’s, took offence. It was then that I wondered whether crookedness was a virtue or a vice. If crookedness was a vice, the protagonist would not have been celebrated as a hero. He would be a villain. Instead the movie as well as its sequel was a giga-hit in Kerala and its Hindi version was a huge box-office hit too. Both Drishyam 1 and 2 are celebrations of crookedness. So is crookedness a virtue or a vice? What makes the protagonist an adorable hero to the hundreds of thousands of people who loved the two movies is not his love for his family but his ingeniousness – his crookedness, in plain words. Innocence is adorable in children. But it is fatal in adults. It will destroy adults. That is why even Jesus counse

  Image courtesy The Culture Trip It was after a pretty long while that Maggie and I decided to add a pair or two of new clothes to our wardrobe yesterday. Ever since the epic demonetisation in 2016, life was as rugged as a rapper’s ravings. The floods and landslides in our neighbourhood followed demonetisation again and again which were doggedly followed by the various waves of a pandemic. When Maggie and I became irrevocably convinced that life was never going to regain its lost rhyme and rhythm, we decided to step out and get on with life. With some new clothes. “Let rhyme and rhythm stay confined in Thomas Gray’s Elegy ,” I muttered to myself as I revved up our demure Alto. We chose a rather recently opened and apparently high-end conglomerate in order to avoid crowds. But, contrary to all our calculations, the parking space of the textile complex was all full and the security staff managing it was not particularly pleased with the modesty of our little vehicle. “The pandemic h

  As soon as I was permitted to read after my cataract surgery, I resumed reading Benyamin’s Malayalam novel whose title translates as The 20 Communist Years of Manthalir . Since most readers of this blog do not read Malayalam, I shall not venture to provide a review of the book. But I loved the novel so much that I would like to look at one of its major themes: the ineluctable human discontent. We keep searching for something in life. It may be happiness or meaning or a purpose for living. The achievement of our goal leaves us disillusioned and hence yearning for something else. All the prominent characters in this novel are seekers of something that would add more value to their lives. Some seek it in religion, some in Communism, and a few others in common worldly successes. Those who seek it in ordinary worldly things seem to be the luckier lot. It is quite easy to become a success in some profession, earn money and live a quotidian life. If you wish to go beyond the mediocrity

Estragon: Don’t touch me! Don’t question me! Don’t speak to me! Stay with me! Vladimir: Did I ever leave you? Estragon: You let me go. The above dialogue is from Samuel Beckett’s play, Waiting for Godot . Love is an abiding presence. It is not merely about not leaving ; it is also about not letting the beloved go. Love is a binding force. But at the same time it is a liberating force too. Love binds you with a chain and at the same time it liberates you more than anything else ever can. There is a scene in the classic book, The Little Prince . A fox approaches the Little Prince with a strange request. “Tame me,” the fox says. “What is taming?” The Little Prince asks. “Taming means to establish ties,” explains the fox. When you tame me, you become responsible for me. Every loving relationship is the embrace of a tremendous responsibility. When the fox wanted to be tamed, it was seeking a place in the Prince’s heart. It longed for the Prince’s attention, an investment of time

  Assessment is both an art and a technique. India's largest school education board, CBSE, has made a mockery of assessment this time with the first terminal examinations of classes 10 and 12. The pandemic forced upon all of us certain changes. CBSE changed its assessment methods by making them all objective type multiple choice questions. Well, circumstances demand certain changes and we won't grumble about that. But how can a mammoth educational board create downrightly ridiculous questions? Doesn't the Board have people with sufficient expertise to prepare effective assessment strategies and methods? As an English teacher, I find the English question paper given to my students yesterday pathetically ineffective particularly in the Writing section. Let me provide a few examples.  Question 20 is about the qualifications required for a receptionist. There are 4 options and 2 of them are: (a) personality, age, experience and (b) age, qualification, experience. Now, which is