Tomichan Matheikal's blog

From 'Open' India is not one but many nations. “You can only speak of India in the plural,” as Dr Shashi Tharoor puts it in his article in the Open magazine’s Freedom Issue dated Aug 22. There are many Indias, he says, making up what India today is. There is too much diversity in this country: languages, cultures, religions, races, and so on for it to be a monolithic nation. Slogans such as One India, One Language, One Religion are not only absurd but also chimeric. Among many other things that make India different from other countries, Tharoor mentions that the country’s civilization gave birth to four major religions, a dozen different traditions of classical dance, 85 political parties and 300 ways of cooking the potato. Where on earth would you find a country in which a Roman Catholic political leader of Italian origin making way for a Sikh man to be sworn in as Prime Minister by a Muslim President? [2004 scenario] India has no majority community, Tharoor argues. Al

A student of mine recommended me a movie the other day: Jana Gana Mana , a Malayalam movie released recently. Since the student insisted that I’d love it, I took the trouble to subscribe to Netflix in order to watch it. I was more interested in knowing whether the student had really assessed my tastes rightly than in the movie itself. I appreciate the student’s assessment now. Jana Gana Mana raises many pertinent questions. Let me bring a few of them here. 1.      Does the law of the country ensure justice? Not in India anyway. Not in present India for sure. Here justice is what certain powers decide as just and true. Innocent students with youthful aspirations become villains in present India while hardcore criminals are the legislators. The judges in our courts are court poets. In a country where people who were buried centuries ago are disinterred for the sake of adding glamour to the present emperor by way of contrast (glitter versus skeleton), in a country where a Chief J

‘Assessment Report on the Sustainable Use of Wild Species’ is the result of a long research by about 300 social and natural scientists from across the world. The study points out that billions of people worldwide rely on about 50,000 wild species for food, energy, medicine and income. 33,000 species are plants and fungi; 7,500 are fish and aquatic creatures; and 9,000 are amphibians, insects, reptiles, birds and mammals. About 10,000 species are used directly for human food. All these facts underscore the importance of wild life and the necessity for its sustainable use. The tribal people of India have always had their own traditional ways for preserving the forests and wild life. They have always been aware of the simple truth that forests are not fragile entities to be conserved through patronage from above. Forests are life itself. Caring for them is not a strategical and legal affair. You can’t preserve the forests merely by making certain laws as we can understand easily by l

The irony in the Prime Minister’s exhortation to Indians to display the national flag in various places may not be lost on those who know the history of India’s freedom struggle. Modi is fundamentally an RSS man and the RSS was bitterly opposed to the national flag and they refused to hoist that flag on 15 Aug 1947. They hoisted the RSS flag instead. The classical book, Freedom at Midnight , describes that flag-hoisting thus:   The ceremony being held on a vacant lot in the inland city of Poona… was similar to thousands like it taking place all across the new dominion of India. It was a flag-raising. One thing, however, set the little ritual apart from most of the others. The flag slowly moving up a makeshift staff in the centre of a group of 500 men was not the flag of an independent India. It was an orange triangle, and emblazoned upon it was the symbol which, in a slightly modified form, had terrorized Europe for a decade, the swastika. Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins,

I live in a state whose people’s most cherished legend is about a utopia. That legend revolves round Mahabali (whom the people of Kerala call Maveli affectionately). Maveli was an Asura (demon) king. But his reign was the most unparalleled in Kerala, according to the legend. No ruler could ever reach anywhere near the good governance implemented by Maveli. Maveli’s reign was marked by honesty, equality, justice and other fundamental human values and virtues. There was no discrimination in the name of castes and creeds. No sectarianism. No jingoism. No hate-filled slogans. No gods, too. Probably, this last thing - absence of gods – made it a utopia. I was brought up in an orthodox Catholic family. As a child I learnt about God and his absurd ways. The Bible opened with the idea of a weird god who created a Paradise (Utopia) for humans only to deceive them sooner than later. God placed an irresistible temptation right in the middle of the Paradise. He knew the human heart wasn’t im

Image courtesy ‘Best of post-truth’ is an oxymoron. Post-truth isn’t good in the first place. So how do you get ‘best’? Post-truth refers to a system (socio-political, usually) in which objective facts are not given as much weightage in shaping public opinion as appeals to emotion and prejudices. Emotions, prejudices, personal beliefs and aspirations determine the evolution of public opinion. Too many countries, including my own India, are traversing the path of post-truth now. Lies are shouted loud, propagated through various media channels, and accepted gladly as truths by a sizable majority of people. Imagine millions of people believing that climate change is not real because their Prime Minister said, Sardi zada hai, unki sehne ki kshamta kam ho gayi hai . Nehru’s ghost is still haunting India’s economy, according to these same people. The Mughals who died centuries ago dominate the nation’s collective psyche. Cows in India fart oxygen. Cow urine can cure cancer. Thus goes the

  Many teachers often ask me for help with the topic of 'Invitation' in CBSE's writing skills section. I condense CBSE's questions in this section thus:  What that means is: 1. There are 2 types of invitation: formal & informal. 2. Formal invitations can be in the form of cards or letters.  3. Cards are used when you have to invite large numbers of people (anniversaries, marriages, etc.) 4. Letters are used when you invite a few individuals.  Example: judges for a competition, chief guest for a function. 5. Informal invitations are used when your function is informal. Example: birthday celebrations, party for celebrating admission to a prestigious institution. 6. Strictly formal replies are used only by people who have ( or should have)  enormous egos. Example: bureaucrats, ambassadors. 7. Formal replies are just ordinary formal letters and informal replies are plain informal letters.  Let me give examples for the above types so that they become clearer.  1. Formal