Tomichan Matheikal's blog

From India Today Knights in Shining Armour Narendra Modi visited the Northeast of his kingdom more than 60 times after he crowned himself as the emperor of India-to-be-renamed-as-Hindustan. Travel is one of his countless passions and hence the number 60 need not bother us. The only place left on the earth for him to visit is Timbuctoo. It is rumoured that he wanted to go to the moon on the latest edition of Chandrayan but the scientists were not quite sure of whether their thing would land in Pakistan mistaking it for the moon. The scientists who made that rocket went to the Tirupati temple to ask Venkateswara (Modi may not know that Hindu God yet!) to direct the rocket scientifically to the moon instead of Pakistan. At that time Modi was in France preaching peace to the world. Om shanti. Let there be peace, said Modi to France. And Manipur burnt. Manipur has to burn for the sake of world peace. Narendra Modi is the name of the last incarnation of God, according to the latest Hind

Book Review Title: Gone Girl Author: Gillian Flynn Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 2012 Pages: 466 This is a masterpiece. It makes you laugh a lot, especially in the early pages. Then it fills you with awe; awe at the complexity of the two main characters: Nick Dunne and his wife Amy Elliott Dunne. As you move to the final section, it terrifies you. This novel is a thriller. Amy Elliott Dunne has vanished. All evidence points to Nick Dunne as the murderer though Amy’s body is not found. There is her diary and a lot more that put Nick in the dock. The whole story is told by Nick and Amy in alternate chapters. And they are amazing narrators. Both are writers, after all. Nick was a journalist writing TV and movie reviews. Amy’s specialisation was making personality quizzes for magazines. Both lost their jobs due to the Recession in 2009 and so they move to Nick’s hometown of North Carthage, Missouri, where Nick opens a bar with his sister Margo. He also finds a j

I have read quite a few articles on the proposed Uniform Civil Code (UCC) and none of them seem to have anything good to say about it. Most of them view it as a political stunt meant to create a sectarian strife with the 2024 general elections around the corner. One of the best illustrations comes from Madhyamam weekly.  Uniform Civil Code is something that the Constituent Assembly discussed in detail and left aside as something not quite practical in a country like India which has too many diverse cultures and practices. I lived in Shillong for a decade and a half. The people of Meghalaya – Khasis, Garos and Jaintias – have their own traditional tribal cultures and practices which are not like the mainland’s culture and practices at all. They all follow slightly different versions of the matrilineal system. The youngest daughter inherits the family property. The surname of the children comes from the mother and not the father though the maternal uncle plays a vital role in many f

Memories are serpentine. They cannot be trusted. What was profoundly sad then can become a tender joy now. More often, sadness lingers. One of those many images that still linger in my memory from years ago belongs to Delhi. Some construction work was going on. I was a witness. For days. The following poem came from what I saw. This poem belongs to those days when I had some sensibility to write poems. A memory. A grief. And a joy that I haven’t lost that sensibility altogether though I don’t write poetry anymore. My Hunger is Concrete   I’m just a year and a half old and am constructing this huge shopping mall.   Here I am sitting in the shade of a bush by the side of the towering structure to which my mother carries the mixture of gravel and sand and cement in a grating crater on her head.   When I’m hungry, I wail loud. That’s when mother comes and makes me stand on a wall, opens her blouse, and pops a nipple into my mouth,  her one hand behind my

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For some people like me, life is a sum of their scars. Life has seldom been a happy affair for me. I endured it day after day. Now, in the autumn of my life, I know that endurance is what life is largely about. I also know that it could have been much less of a torment if I had learnt a few lessons in time. One of those lessons is that we learn the most vital lessons too late. That’s how life is designed to be: a series of errors . You are destined to err all along the way. You may learn the necessary lessons and correct yourself, your ways, your attitudes, or whatever requires correction. Yet you will make errors again, new ones. What it means is that we are all pathetically imperfect creatures. That’s the first lesson I needed to learn long, long ago. I had a painful compulsion to be correct all the time, to be perfect. It made my life miserable. It made other people’s life miserable too sometimes. The compulsive desire for perfection made unearthly demands on me as well as ot

Book Review Title: The Witch in the Peepul Tree Author: Arefa Tehsin Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2023 Pages: 327 There is no witch in this novel and the peepul tree hardly plays any role. Both the witch and the peepul are metaphors. In the words of one of the characters, “There is an evil influence in this house, something which is not human.” The house belongs to Dada Bhai who is an exceptionally benevolent human being. His beautiful wife Mena is as good too and she has devoted her life to such noble social causes as empowerment of women and education of girls. Yet there is something sinister about their house. There may be a witch lurking in the heart of the best of people. This novel is set on the Makar Sankranti day of 1950 in the historical city of Udaipur. The entire plot unfolds in that one single day. In the afternoon of that day, Dada Bhai’s young son discovers the dead body of his 16-year-old sister Sanaz in her room. Did the living witch in the peepul tree