Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Can you impose a language on the birds? Can you make the pigeons in Delhi coo in Hindi, for example? Will they arrest the pigeons as antinational creatures for refusing to coo in Hindi? In ‘The Last Lesson’, a short story written by French writer Alphonse Daudet [1840-1897], the protagonist, a very young student in a French school, wonders whether the Germans will make the pigeons sing in German since his province of Alsace has been conquered by Bismarck. One of the very first things that conquerors do is to impose their culture and language on the new subjects. The conquest is complete only when the subjects give up their own idols and embrace the new ones. The imposed ones. One of the reasons why I never learnt Hindi properly though I lived in North India for the most part of my life is that I had wings. I was a pigeon that knew only one language. Coo. Coo-coo. Coo coo coo. Can you take away that language? You can take away my food. You can take away my dress. You can take

  I had just been two years into my career as a teacher when Salman Rushdie’s most controversial novel, The Satanic Verses , was published. Now 34 years later, two years after my official retirement from the job, Rushdie has been punished savagely for writing that book. Punished by a person who never read the book. The punishment was ordered by a religious leader who, I’m sure, had also not cared to read the book. Ignorance and hatred are the fundamental driving forces of popular religion. The Satanic Verses explores faith and doubt with a kind of ingenuity that only Rushdie possessed. The novel looked at the validity of divine revelation and scriptures with incisive humour as well as irrepressible agony of the soul. It makes use of dream sequences and fantasy and melodrama to tell the story of Gibreel Farishta, a Bollywood movie star with a conflicted soul torn between faith and doubt. There are a few equally captivating characters in the novel like Saladin Chamcha, a voice actor

Poetry begins where science ends. “What flower is that over there?” The gardener will answer, “A lily.” That’s a plain factual statement. The botanist will tell you that the flower belongs to the order of Hexandria monogynia. That is science. Edmund Spenser says, “It is the lady of the garden.” Spenser is a poet. Ben Jonson, another poet, calls it “the plant and flower of light.” Jesus asked his followers to take a lesson from the lily: “They toil not, nor do they spin. Yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." That is spirituality. There is poetry in spirituality. In fact, poetry is another form of spirituality. A few weeks back, I wrote in this very same space that “If [poet] Keats cared to establish a religion, its deity would have been Beauty.” When Jesus equated himself (god) with Truth, Keats equated Beauty with Truth. Wordsworth found similar truth and sanctity in Nature. Isn’t every genuine poet on a spiritual quest? But poetic truths are not

Kafka is petulant. I am not surprised. What else should I have expected? Didn’t I know that he would never like to spend a day with a stranger and that too someone as aloof as me? Neither he nor I wanted anyone’s company merely because we would never be comfortable with any other person. We are not comfortable with ourselves in the first place. Kafka would describe himself as “a cage in search of a bird.” I am the empty cage, in fact. Not he. He has earned his admittance to the Paradise. I am like the man from the countryside in his novel, The Trial , who spent years seeking admittance and finally died in vain. Was he at the wrong gate? No, he is assured by the gatekeeper who keeps accepting the bribes given by the seeker. Years pass. The seeker grows old. He has stopped asking questions. He only mutters to himself. He grows childish. His eyes grow dim. Or is the world growing darker? He realises he is dying. He has a last question to ask the gate-keeper. Was he at the right door at

The Hindi movie, Darlings , is sheer delight to watch. There is no glitter, no glamour, no flamboyance. It’s about some very ordinary people living in a lower middle-class housing tenement without big ambitions. They want a better residence. And some normal human joys – like a child in the family or a husband who cares. Badru’s [Badrunissa played eminently by Alia Bhatt] husband Hamza [Vijay Varma] is an alcoholic who doesn’t care about anything except himself. Alcoholism, like most other addictions, is about egomania. Addicts are people who don’t love anybody. Not even themselves. But they are always trying to find something within themselves that is worth loving. Addiction is a result of not being able to discover anything to love in oneself. “What am I but a toilet cleaner [TC]?” When Hamza who is a Ticket Collector [TC] asks that question to himself, he is revealing much about himself. He is incapable of questioning his boss who makes him clean his toilet regularly. Instead o

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