Tomichan Matheikal's blog

I was 16 or 17 when I watched the movie Fiddler on the Roof first time. The character of the protagonist Tevye made a deep impression on me then. Later I watched that movie many times. I bought a CD when I was in charge of the Media Room of Sawan Public School in Delhi and showed the movie to my students. Even now I watch it occasionally. Tevye has been one of my most admired characters. It is Tevye’s simple goodness that I find adorable. Right at the beginning of the movie, Tevye tells us that tradition is of vital importance to him and his people, the Jews living in a Ukrainian village in the early 1900s. The situation of the Jews is as precarious as that of a fiddler on the roof who will break his neck if he does not keep his balance adroitly. It is tradition that helps them to maintain that balance. They have tradition for everything: how to wear clothes, what and how to eat, how to pray, the duties of each person at home as well as in society, and so on. How did all these tra

My "cute" house “It’s only when you construct a house you learn how to construct one and by then it’s too late for that lesson.” A friend of mine whom I visited last week said that. The construction work of his house was in the last phase. The house looked like a mansion, a palace that befits an NRI which my friend is. I wondered why my friend was dissatisfied with it. I had reasons to be unhappy with my own house. I had handed over the contract lock, stock and barrel to a builder who was from my own village. He didn’t understand me at all. When I said simplicity he understood cuteness. When I said elegance, he understood ostentation. In the end, the house wasn’t at all what I had in mind. But you can build your house only once. You are destined to live within your blunders until your death. Unless you keep changing your house as one of my relatives did. He didn’t stay in any house for more than a few years. He would start constructing another one months after shifting

Slum and Skyscrapers in Mumbai: by Alicja Dobrucka A few weeks back, when the World Economic Forum was meeting in Davos, some of the wealthiest people in the world wrote an open letter , titled In tax we trust, to their “fellow millionaires and billionaires.” The letter drew the attention of the affluent people of the world to the gaping chasm between the rich and the poor and squarely laid the blame on the prevailing economic system which “until now has been deliberately designed to make the rich richer.” The forthrightness of the letter is admirable. The prevailing economic system which makes the rich richer is unjust, the letter admits candidly. “This injustice … has created a colossal lack of trust between the people of the world and the elites who are the architects of this system. Bridging that divide is going to take more than billionaire vanity projects or piecemeal philanthropic gestures – it’s going to take a complete overhaul of a system…” Let us pay more tax than th

  “The really great men must have great sadness on earth,” Dostoevsky wrote in Crime and Punishment . Dostoevsky believed that enlightened intelligence and deep heart can only come through much pain and suffering. Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Crime and Punishment , is intelligent. But he does not have a loving heart. On the contrary, he detests humankind. He thinks of the human species as essentially evil – cruel, scoundrelly and corrupt. There is nothing wrong in doing away with some of these evil creatures. In fact, if you want to be another great person like Napoleon, if you want to be the Nietzschean superman, you need to rise above the sentimental morality of mediocre people. So Raskolnikov goes and commits a murder. He kills an old woman whom he thinks of as an evil person. In the process, he ends up killing an innocent woman too in order to get rid of the witness to his crime. Raskolnikov does not become a Napoleon or a superman, however. He is tormented by the murders he

  Ideal partners Facebook has blocked me for not following “community standards” because I wondered in a comment whether one of its users was mentally retarded. That person whose IQ looked suspect has a name which is an odd mix of North Indian Brahmin and South Indian Roman Catholic. When he/she (the name is male and the profile pic is female) got me blocked for wondering facetiously about his/her IQ, I checked his/her profile and saw that he/she was an Indian living abroad having studied at Copenhagen International School and Imperial College of London. He/she is apparently very nationalistic. Strangely, he/she reminded me of Anjum/Aftab, the hijra character in Arundhati Roy’s novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness though they have nothing in common. What I don’t understand, however, is why Facebook bothers to block anyone just because he wonders about the IQ of one of its users. Facebook’s own IQ is highly suspect. It is just a swindling medium. I don’t really care whether it e

Two things happened this morning. One was a message from long-term friend, Jose Maliekal, who is a Salesian priest. The second was that I started reading a novel titled A Man Called Ove . Both together reminded me of the challenge I have undertaken for February: Blogchatter’s #WriteAPageADay . Maliekal’s message was about Don Bosco’s love for keeping the boys under his care productively engaged even if that meant disturbing the sleep of a visiting bishop. Was the missionary in Don Bosco driven by recklessness or temerity? Maliekal’s message raised that question. And the message ended with an apparently wavering hope that I loved Don Bosco though I didn’t love his priests. Ove in the novel is a 59-year-old man (just a couple of years younger than me) who is “the kind of man who points at people he doesn’t like the look of, as if they were burglars and his forefinger a policeman’s torch.” Once upon a time I was just like that. And Don Bosco’s priests and some other equally spirit e

In June 2020, the Modi government launched an auction of 39 coal blocks in the country. Enormous areas of forests and farmlands were auctioned off to the corporate sector for mining. The livelihood of thousands of poor people was taken away from them by the proposed mines. Worse, the entire ecological system of the country would be ravaged. “Respect for nature is an integral part of our culture and has been passed across generations,” Modi was exhorting the nation while his friend Adani was getting his bulldozers ready to clear forests and farmlands for mining. “Protection of environment comes naturally to us,” Modi said while his government was selling the environment wholesale to the corporate sector. “Can greed ever be green?” The Guardian asked once while discussing ‘Capitalism v environment’. Capitalism is all about profit. Profit before all else: before people, before environment, before the nation itself. The capitalist economic system has been thriving on exploitation o