Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Once upon a time a young snake belonging to a breed that had not been seen hitherto appeared in the Snake Temple [ Sarppakkavu ] in God’s Own Country. “I come from the universe,” the new arrival declared rather majestically. “I am on a spiritual quest,” he added. He went on to say many things like: he was a celibate, he had completed the char dham yatra, his aspiration was to become a viswaguru, and so on.     “He’s king cobra,” the oldest viper among the snakes in Snake Temple said. The other snakes looked at King Cobra in admiration. King Cobra was very eloquent. He spoke words of apparent wisdom. He enlightened the snakes in the Snake Temple on their ancient heritage. “Our gods had serpents for bed, serpents as crown on head,” he said. “Serpents are divine. We snakes should be united.” The rat snakes and wolf snakes and vipers and kraits and each and every snake in the Sarppakkavu were impressed by the eloquence of King Cobra. All these snakes of different breeds and classes a

Raina is the heroine of Bernard Shaw’s anti-war play, Arms and the Man . Her father is a major in the army and her fiancé is a soldier who risks his life with ostensible heroism for the sake of his country which is in war. The plot unfolds during the 1885 war between Bulgaria and Serbia. It is only natural that Raina has romantic notions about war. War is seen as an act of patriotism or nationalism by mediocre minds. There are many people for whom war has romantic shades insofar as war is one of the ideals of the nation. You will find countless such people if you look around. All those who clamour for wars with their neighbouring countries for one reason or another tend to be romantic fools at heart. That was Bernard Shaw’s view. For Shaw, war is a useless occupation of people who don’t know what better things to do with their imagination or lack of imagination. Such people find it fun to go and scratch out some land belonging to the neighbour or start a fight over whose god is sup

Que Sera, Sera (What will be, will be) is a song from the 1956 Hitchcock movie, The Man Who Knew Too Much . As a child, the singer asked her mother what she would be? Would she be pretty and rich? And mother’s reply was: Que sera, sera. The future’s not ours to see, she added. When the girl grew up and became a young woman, she repeated the question with a slight change to her sweetheart and the reply was the same. Once again, the question is repeated. This time it comes from her children. And she gives them too the same answer. This song has started playing again and again in my mind these days. I imagine a girl who is not so little – let’s call her Sara – and who is not quite happy with that answer. “Imagine those two little kids in the Kiev flat , left there by their 20-year-old mother for nine days without food and one of whom died,” Sara tells me with tears welling up in her eyes. Sara has a genuine concern about our world. “What will be is what we make it to be,” she tel

The choice was between awareness and paradise. Paradise was lost in that conflict. That is how the Bible tells the story of the origin of humankind. The great English poet, John Milton, converted that myth into one of the most moving epic poems titled Paradise Lost . Paradise had to be lost if the human creature had to rise above the state of being a mere animal, a creature with a lower consciousness level. Adam and Eve were innocent until they ate the fruit of knowledge, the forbidden fruit. The only condition that God had put on the first couple was that they should not strive to rise above being mere animals. “Do not eat the fruit of knowledge” meant that Adam and Eve should remain as ignorant and hence as innocent as the other animals in Paradise. Paradise is a state of innocence. It is not a place. When Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, they lost innocence but gained awareness or a higher level of consciousness. Milton’s epic poem presents Eve as “our credulous mother.” It

  Cherai Beach, Kochi The beach is one of the loveliest places on earth. I can spend hours sitting on the sand and looking at the restless sea. The waves. What are they hungry for? They never rest. You can watch a wave coming from far away in the sea and moving relentlessly, on and on, until it lashes against the shore and returns. And returns. It is an endless process. A process that started somewhere beyond the reach of your vision. Your vision ends where they call the horizon. But you know that the horizon is not the end. It is the beginning, in fact, the beginning of another world. Another world from where Vasco da Gama was carried by the restless waves to Kerala many centuries ago carrying the Portuguese colonial power in a few ships. The tang of pepper and cinnamon on the beaches of Calicut beckoned Vasco and his crew like the sirens on the enchanted island of Odyssey . Vasco came, Vasco saw, Vasco conquered. The legacy left by him five centuries ago has survived to this day

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children describes nationalism as “a dream we all agreed to dream.” Without that collective dream, it would be quite impossible to keep a nation like India united in spite of the million mutinies that have always simmered beneath the veneer of its unity. We need the dream. As much a dream as religious paradises are dreams. Political scientist Benedict Anderson argues that nationalism is more like   religion and kinship . There is no logic in religion and kinship. There are only emotions. It’s about bonding people together in a strange stupor of intoxication. Have you ever experienced that the feeling deep within you when you hear a moving patriotic song is similar to the feeling given by a religious exercise? Anderson goes on to say that nationalism has never produced its own philosophers . It has hooligans and killers. It has sloganeers and rhetoricians. But no philosophers. Nationalism, like religions, does not require thinking. Like drugs, it is ab

The Dancing Girl of Mohenjodaro looks only about 15 years old. But there she stands, apparently in front of many people including elders, “looking perfectly confident of herself and the world,” in the words of British archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler. John Marshall, the archaeologist who announced the discovery of the statuette in 1926, was struck by the “half-impudent posture” of the young girl. He just couldn’t believe that the statuette belonged to the period of 2300-1750 BCE. Was she really dancing? No one is sure. “She was good at what she did and she knew it,” says archaeologist Gregory Possehl. Today, some 4000 years after that Dancing Girl was carved in bronze by an artist living in Mohenjodaro, the status of women in society deserves a probe. I would like to look at it just from two angles. One is the Sabarimala issue that rocked Kerala three years ago. According to tradition, women in the menstruating age-group are not allowed to visit the Sabarimala temple since the pres