Tomichan Matheikal's blog

image from istock The Monkey’s Paw , a short story by W W Jacobs, revolves around a talisman. An Indian fakir created the talisman which is a mummified monkey’s paw. Three persons can have three wishes each fulfilled with the help of the paw. But there’s a catch: the consequences of getting your wish thus fulfilled – by meddling with nature through the supernatural – can be formidable. When the paw reaches Mr White, two persons have had their wishes already fulfilled. The first one killed himself with the third wish. The second one, who speaks about its ominous possibilities, throws the paw into fire saying that he did not want one more person to suffer because of it. Mr White retrieves it from the fire. Mr White makes a simple wish. Just 200 pounds which will repay all his debts. His wish was as simple as that. Yet he paid too heavy a price for the fulfilment of that wish. Next day, 200 pounds came to his house as insurance-compensation for the tragic death of his son in an acci

A church in Kottayam, Kerala Frederick Douglas was a slave in in the 19 th century America. After emancipation, he wrote a book titled Narrative (1845) in which he mentions his master’s spirituality. His master experienced a religious transformation at a Methodist revival programme. Douglas naturally thought that his master would become a kind and magnanimous person after his religious transformation. What good is religion and spirituality if they don’t make you at least a person with basic human kindness? Douglas found, however, that his master became “more cruel and hateful in all his ways.” We are living in a time when a lot of atrocities are being perpetrated in the name of gods and religions. Don’t they make you wonder what good religion is, gods are, if they bring more agony and evil into our world? I gave up religion long ago precisely because of this problem. I noticed that religions bring more evil into the human affairs than anything else – with the exception of politic

Rand on my shelf Ayn Rand is a writer who enchanted millions of young people in the second half of the 20 th century. I was one of those millions. My first encounter with Rand was utterly casual. I was travelling back to Shillong from Kerala after the winter vacation. A friend who was on the train was reading The Fountainhead . When he went to sleep after lunch, I picked up the book and read a few pages. I was enchanted. Howard Roark, the hero of that novel, was my kind of the ideal man in those days. He would have had similar effect on a lot of young people in those days, I’m sure. Roark is a genius who is condemned to be an outsider by the society’s ineluctable mediocrity. Roark remains outside the social conventions. He refuses to be moulded by the normal social forces. He makes his own choices which determine his life. He is his own man. And a defiant one too. I loved him. I was in my 20s. I continued to read the novel whenever my friend was not reading it. By the time the t

Quintin Matsys, from Wikipedia There was a young man in Antwerp. And there was a young girl too. We don’t need anything more to begin a romantic story. And that’s just what happened. The man and the girl fell in love with each other. Passionately. The normal course would have been marriage and family life. But that didn’t happen. Because the man was a blacksmith and farrier by profession and the girl was the daughter of a painter. ‘I don’t want my daughter to marry a blacksmith,’ the master painter asserted. It was in the 15 th century. Feminism was not even a thought-experiment. And the boys didn’t have all the fun. Love has a unique power – the century doesn’t matter. Quintin Matsys was determined to win over the master painter and then his daughter. He sneaked into the master’s studio one day and painted a small fly on the master’s current frame. When the master returned to the studio, he tried to swat the fly only to discover that it was a painted one. The master was quick t

A palimpsest is a manuscript or piece of writing material on which later writing has been superimposed on erased earlier writing. In the olden days, when parchments were used for writing, palimpsests were quite common. The motive for reusing parchments must have been pragmatic and economic. Maybe, political too, as when Christianity replaced original pagan writings with its own texts. Jawaharlal Nehru described India as a palimpsest, “an ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously.” India witnessed many conquests. As a result, quite a variety of cultures and civilisations entered the country and intermingled. Hinduism, Islam and the Western civilisation, all have left their imprints on the palimpsest that India is today. The present government in Delhi is going out of its way to erase a lot of the country’s past and write an entirely new history

I was reading an essay on octopuses when friend John walked in. When he is bored of his usual activities – babysitting and gardening – he would come over. Politics was the favourite concern of our conversations. We discussed politics so earnestly that any observer might think that we were running the world through the politicians quite like the gods running it through their devotees. “Octopuses are quite queer creatures,” I said. The essay I was reading had got all my attention. Moreover, I was getting bored of politics which is irredeemable anyway. “They have too many brains and a lot of hearts.” “That’s queer indeed,” John agreed. “Each arm has a mind of its own. Two-thirds of an octopus’s neurons are found in their arms. The arms can taste, touch, feel and act on their own without any input from the brain.” “They are quite like our politicians,” John observed. Everything is linked to politics in John’s mind. I was impressed with his analogy, however. “Perhaps, you’re r

The title of George Orwell’s celebrated novel could have been 2024 and its setting India. Winston Smith is a low-ranking member of the ruling party. Like anyone else in the country, he is also under the constant surveillance of Big Brother, the omniscient ruler of the country. Big Brother’s Party controls everything including the people’s history and language and even their thoughts. Certain words are banned from Newspeak, the official language. Even nurturing rebellious thoughts is criminal and ‘thought-crime’ is the worst. Winston works in the Ministry of Truth which is rewriting the history of the country. Even love is a crime and so Winston has to keep his love for Julia secret. Winston is trapped eventually by the spying police and is subjected to severe brainwashing. Finally he begins to love Big Brother and to have no feelings whatever for Julia whom he has betrayed. My summary doesn’t do justice to Orwell’s great work. Frankly, I had never considered 1984 a great work u