Tomichan Matheikal's blog

  The latest issue of India Today [April 4] carries a detailed feature on the Kashmiri Pandits. It is worth looking at some of the facts presented by the weekly especially because the recent Bollywood movie has struck a raw nerve and evoked diverse reactions. First of all, why were the Pandits targeted ? The attack was not simply because of religious animosity as the film tries to make it out. India Today says that the Kashmiri Pandits accounted for just 4% of J&K’s population, “but their influence over the affairs of the state far exceeded their numbers.” The Pandits were an integral part of the ruling elite during the harsh Dogra rule. After Independence, the Pandits continued to occupy high positions in both the state and central government offices. Though they were only 4% of the population, 30% of the farmland in the state was owned by them. A major share of commerce was under their control. India Today points out that there was “the famed spirit of Kashmiriyat or the

  “Do you really believe that you are a selfless person?” Draupadi asks Bhishma in my short story, The Autumn of the Patriarch . And the Patriarch of two kingdoms stands speechless before that question. What prevented Bhishma from seeing the adharma of what was done to Draupadi first by Yudhishthira and then by Duryodhana? What kind of dharma did this man, this great patriarch, practise? Draupadi contemplates. She recalled what he had done to Amba, Ambika and Ambalika. Just carried them off without even bothering to find out what their wishes were. And then gave them to another man as wives. As if women were commodities made for gratifying men’s varied pleasures some of which were as perverse as Bhishma’s when he carried them off like trophies. And when Amba faced problems one after another because of what Bhishma did, the great patriarch treated her as if she were a lump of cow dung. No, even cow dung gets more respect! “Dharma is too subtle,” Bhishma tells Amba in my story. “Trut

Jawaharlal Nehru wrote in The Discovery of India that religion “played little part in Indian political conflicts, though the word (religion) is often enough used and exploited.” He went on to argue that it is not religion that created problems but “what is called communalism , a narrow group mentality basing itself on a religious community but in reality concerned with political power and patronage for the group concerned.” What Nehru wrote 80 years ago is truer today than then. India now is ruled by a political party that is cynically ‘using and exploiting’ the Hindu religion for the sake of political power. Unfortunately a large number of Hindus have fallen prey to the sinister manoeuvres orchestrated by a handful of crafty men who have dictatorial ambitions and grandiose visions. A sizeable section of India’s population today stands poisoned in heart and mind by hatred of certain religious communities, thanks to the crafty manoeuvres of a few. Nehru’s vision is crystal clea

18 million Indian citizens are living abroad, working or studying, according to a report published in Jan 2021. Now the number could be more. In addition to that number are people of Indian origin who live in other countries but are not Indian citizens. In short, there is a huge number of Indians living in other countries. One of the interesting facts in the 2021 report is that the United Arab Emirates has the highest number of Indians, 3.5 million. That is a Muslim country. It is followed by the USA (2.7 million). Saudi Arabia, another Muslim country, is at the third place with 2.5 million Indians. Kuwait, Oman, Pakistan and Qatar have sizeable populations of Indians. These people working abroad contribute substantially to India’s revenue. The irony is that quite many of them living out there are hardcore right-wing nationalists. Every day, invariably, you will find them writing in the social media against the Muslims of India and occasionally against Christians too. They have

Even propaganda deserves a better standard than Vivek Ranjan Agnihotri’s The Kashmir Files . The last half an hour of the movie is pathetically propagandist with sermons of all sorts. The concluding frames left me nauseated. No, there was absolutely no need to show every single one of those murders. Especially that little child’s. Not so unaesthetically, at least. Cinema is an art, Agnihotri bhai, not an insipid ad for your pet ideology. The first half had some good drama. I thought I made the right decision to watch the movie though none of the reviews I had read gave me any reason to make the decision. Soon drama gave way to blood-curdling scenes. Violence of all sorts. Terrorist violence on the one hand and violence on art on the other. If the Muslim terrorists in Kashmir committed the former, Agnihotri’s direction did the latter. The word ‘narrative’ is mentioned again and again in the movie especially toward the end. The Kashmir Files is a narrative and little more. It is a

Photo by Deepak Amembal Whenever I see crimes committed in the name of religion, I am baffled. Ask any religious believer about religion and you will surely hear that all religions teach believers to be good, loving, compassionate, etc. But the crimes committed in the name of religions or gods outnumber all other crimes, I think. Remember the Christian crusades and Muslim jihads, for example. The numerous acts of genocide in the name of religions or gods, witch hunts, burning of heretics, the Holocaust (Hitler was not motivated by religion but his victims all belonged to a particular religion), religious terrorism, ethnic cleansing, lynching… Not all of them are things of the past. Someone tells me that these acts are committed by a minority of people. Most people don’t take their religion to such extremes. So I look around at the very ordinary people I know. They are all religious in the sense that they go to church or temple or mosque. They pray regularly. They practise the ritua

Along with a few score of other bloggers, I’m accepting the A2Z Challenge of Blogchatter . This entails the writing of 26 blogposts in the month of April with each successive topic corresponding to a letter in the alphabet. This is the fourth time I’m accepting this challenge. I found it fun particularly in the last two years though quite exacting especially if you are hard up for time. But something productive emerges out of the exercise. What I wrote for this challenge in the last 2 years is available in book form in the public domain. Below are the links. 1. Great Books for Great Thoughts 2. Life: 24 Essays This time my theme is Prismatic Dispersions . A prism disperses light into its various components. We all learnt in junior school about the enchanting VIBGYOR. It was amazing to know as a little child that the ordinary white light that we took for granted consisted of so many sparkling colours. Later I thought of VIBGYOR as a metaphor for life itself. For life’s truths,