Tomichan Matheikal's blog

A few years ago, Home Minister Amit Shah infuriated the people of Kerala by wishing them Happy Vamana Jayanti on the occasion of their state festival Onam. While Vamana is the fifth incarnation of God Vishnu for Amit Shah and his counterparts in North India, Vamana is a monstrous impostor for Malayalis. (That’s yet another of the umpteen instances that highlight the impossibility of a monolithic Hindu religion.) Vamana sent Kerala’s most beloved king, Maveli, to the netherworld merely because of jealousy. Maveli (elision for Maha Bali or Bali the Great) was a demon (asura) king. But he was beloved to his subjects because during his reign Kerala was a utopia. There was fraternity, equality, justice, truthfulness, and so on everywhere in the kingdom. Maveli had become greater than the gods for the people of Kerala. Obviously, gods didn’t like that. So none less than Vishnu took the form of a dwarf, Vamana, and deceived Maveli. That deception was punishment from gods to an asura for b

  Mediocre existence is utter absurdity. Poet Tennyson made the Greek hero, Ulysses, rage against that sort of existence in one of his most celebrated poems titled after the hero himself . Tennyson’s Ulysses is an old man who is quite unhappy with a life that seems idle to him. He looks around and sees the ordinary people doing nothing more than eat, mate and hoard. What’s the point of such an existence? Ulysses thinks of it as “savage” existence. Ulysses wants to live life to its fullest. “I will drink / Life to the lees” is what he says. His heart is hungry for more, more than what satisfies the ‘savage’ man. Ruling a country of ‘savages’ is not his work, Ulysses thinks. His son who possesses a different spirit of “slow prudence” can do the job of subduing a savage people “to the useful and the good.” His own mission is “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” Tennyson’s Ulysses is an eternal seeker. To be fully human and fully alive is his dream. Life never gives us fu

Maggie and I went out today for some shopping and had lunch out. The government gained a few thousand rupees. We bought some clothes. The taxes were about 6% on average. Even a decent shirt costs over Rs 2000 today. I bought two shirts and a pair of trousers. Maggie bought a sari and a couple of churidars. The bill comes around Rs 20,000. The government gets 6%: that is, Rs 1200. We go for lunch. The bill is about Rs 500. The government gets Rs 60. We buy soaps and other essential items from a hypermarket. The government gets a few hundred rupees. We fill fuel in the car. The government becomes a highway thief. I buy a bottle of Morpheus brandy on the way back since it’s weekend. Cost: Rs 1386. The government gets more than Rs 800 by way of tax on that one single bottle because the tax on liquor in Kerala is 250%. Wow! I renew my car’s insurance. The government swindles me out of a few thousand rupees on the minimum premium possible. I go to the bank to check my account. The govern

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