Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Hindi is being imposed on Indians once again. The 11 th volume of the Report of the Official Language Committee headed by Amit Shah has been submitted for the approval of the President. The chief ministers of both Kerala and Tamil Nadu have registered their protest against this fresh move to impose Hindi on people who have nothing to do with that language. This move of Amit Shah is yet another instance of the ruling party’s objective of decimating the minority cultures in the country. Language is an integral part of a culture. Amit Shah and his accomplice Modi nurture the dream of creating a Hindu Rashtra in India. The latest move to impose Hindi on the entire country is part of the materialization of that dream. The Shah panel has made around 100 recommendations one of which is that the medium of instruction in IITs, IIMs, and central universities should be Hindi in the Hindi-speaking states. There are numerous students from non-Hindi-speaking states like Kerala and Tamil Nadu st

Book Review The Shortest History of India by John Zubrzycki cannot be made any shorter. In 260 pages, the author manages to condense the history of a vast period from the Harappan civilisation to the present. There are ten chapters, each of which focuses on a particular period. In fact, the book starts with the earliest people of India who existed some 1.5 million years ago. “The discovery of Palaeolithic tools in South India pushes back the timeline … to 1.5 million years ago, making them one of the earliest populations outside Africa,” says the book in one of its initial pages. But the book does not go into the details of that ancient period. India witnessed many invasions. The earliest must have been those by the Aryans. The book says, “What caused the decline of the Harappan civilisation in the lead-up to its demise in 1300 BCE is still open to interpretation. Later religious texts suggest that invading war-like pastoralists who had mastered horse-drawn chariots laid waste

  I wanted to sing a song - A song about rivers of love and suns of joy   But the river that once bathed me now carries the tears of the girl who killed herself in it after being raped by people who claimed to be guardians of her morality. Or, was it her loyalty to the nation that they protected?   The sun lashed the land with the same zest of those guardians And the farmer was driven to his death The beetroot I eat carries his blood And the stench of the pesticide that took his life.   His land is being taken over by the government to build the tallest statue in the world to honour the latest patriot.   I can hear the rumble of galled slogans in the distant land where fairies used to sing once. How do I sing my song now?   Try in Hindi, my friend said. That’s the language of the patriot.        

Image courtesy here The following quote that I came across quite by chance struck me simply because it seemed to reflect me quite as a mirror does. “I am nothing but a dilettante, a dilettante in painting, in poetry, in music, and several others of the so-called unprofitable arts. Above all else I am a dilettante in life. Up to the present I have lived as I have painted and written poetry. I never got far beyond the preparation, the plan, the first act, the first stanza. There are people like that who begin everything and never finish anything. I am such a one.” The self-description belongs to the Austrian writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch from whose name came the word ‘masochism’. The writer was certainly not chuffed with that coinage contributed by an Austrian psychiatrist who justified it saying, “I feel justified in calling this sexual anomaly ‘Masochism’ because the author Sacher-Masoch frequently made this perversion, which up to his time was quite unknown to the scientific wo

Around 10,000 people assembled yesterday [Gandhi Jayanti day 2022] in Kochi to proclaim their atheism loud and clear. It was advertised as “the biggest atheist conference in the world.” Is God dying? In America, church membership has been declining consistently in the last few years. The renowned Gallup poll informs us that more than half of the Americans have given up church. The attendance in church was 70% in 1999 and 50% in 2018. In 2020, 47% of Americans said they belonged to a church. The Pew Research Center predicted in 2015 that by 2050 the Muslims will nearly equal the number of Christians around the world. Atheists will make up a declining share of the world’s population, according to Pew. But the gathering in Kochi yesterday seems to be contradicting that. More and more people seem to be getting disillusioned with religion and god. I am yet to come across any reliable study which suggests that gods will become extinct in a few decades though I raised the provocative

From Pinterest As we are on the eve of yet another Gandhi Jayanti, it is appropriate to look at how far India has come from the Mahatma’s vision. Gandhi envisaged an India in which every citizen is free to think, speak and act according to his conscience. And today nearly six lakh Indians are in the country’s prisons most of whom (80%) are undertrials of whom many were arrested for thinking freely. You may not be entitled to think, speak and act according to your conscience in today’s India unless your conscience has been dyed in saffron. When you realise that 21% of the prisoners in the country are SCs, 9% STs, and 18% Muslims, you may begin to wonder why half of the prisoners belong to the marginalised communities. You look further into the stats and realise with a touch of chagrin that the country’s prisons are overcrowded. The occupancy rate in 2021 was 120% while it rose to 130% in the next year. Now it must be still more with the recent arrests related to the PFI affair. Go f

One of my favourite short story writers has been Somerset Maugham for a long while. The most obvious reason is that the characters he presents in his stories are hauntingly fascinating. The second reason is the themes he deals with. And I must add his quintessential cynicism to the list too. He didn’t hold humanity in high regard. In the words of one of his own characters, “Perhaps the best of us are sinners and the worst of us are saints.” Deftly crafted characters and themes carved straight from ordinary human life are the primary ingredients of a good short story, for me. Maugham had the additional virtue of telling those stories in a simple, unadorned style that keeps the reader hooked till the end. His insights into human nature were shrewd. Maugham didn’t go for the kind of technical gymnastics we find in today’s stories. Let me present just two of his characters to illustrate what I’m saying. One is a zealous Christian missionary named Davidson who is determined to reform