Tomichan Matheikal's blog

K Satchidanandan is a bilingual poet and writer from Kerala. He has won many awards including the Sahitya Akademi Award. His latest short story, published in a Malayalam weekly [ Deshabhimani ] is titled Robinson Crusoe and is about a contemporary dictator who is making waves all over the world.  Crusoe Crusoe returns from his last voyage as an ambitious man who wants to be the boss of the island. He has forgotten the hard days of the past, his Man Friday, the agriculture he had done for survival, his hut and the dog and the cat there, and so on. Now he is an impatient man with a huge ambition. He is a lord who has hoards of slaves. This island to which he has now returned was once upon a time the habitat of cannibals. Not now, however. The inhabitants now speak different languages, wear different dresses, worship different gods. There are too many cultures and festivals. How can anyone rule over such a diverse people? Brusoe came with the solution. Brusoe is as clever as Chanak

  Image from Malayalam weekly After the Modi government took charge of the nation in 2014, the number of assaults on women hit a record. In 2021 alone, in spite of the Covid-lockdowns, there were 31,677 cases registered in this regard. A lot more assaults go unregistered for various reasons. 87 rapes take place in India ever day now. That is the official statistic. You can imagine the real number. There is little connection between word and deed in Modi governance. The empowerment of women was one of the loudest slogans of Modi when he came to power. Nine years later, women have been enfeebled more than ever. There are a lot of slogans and projects like Beti Bachao Beti Padhao and Mahila Samman Bachat Patra Yojana . Diarrhoea of words and constipation of deeds. One bizarre truth is that women have been transmuted into battlefields in Modi’s India. Rape is a weapon that the right wing in India now wields effectively. Manipur is the latest war zone. How many women have been raped there

From The Print India is going to be a superpower. When my Prime Minister says that I should feel proud. My veins should bulge with the thrust of rushing blood of patriotism. I wonder why my blood doesn’t rush. Am I not patriotic? Am I an antinational Modi-baiter who should be put behind the bars like hundreds of others ? A whole state called Manipur is burning in the imminent superpower. People are killing one another. The Prime Minister hasn’t said a word about it though the violence has been going on for nearly three months. When a video surfaced showing the brutal treatment that the PM’s supporters extended patriotically to two women in Manipur, Modiji condescended to say that such treatment of women was very un-Hindustani. And that was an utter lie. Hindustani culture burnt women on their husbands’ funeral pyres. And Modiji is a diehard fan of that great ancient Indian culture . The great Indian culture has always stifled the vast majority of people in various guises like th

You meet an old man with an unearthly sparkle in his eyes on a street in one of Coleridge's poems. He insists on telling you his story. He was a sailor. A tempest carried his ship away, beyond all human control, to the South Pole. And there the ship lay stuck in the ice with huge icebergs towering all around. No sign of life anywhere. It looked like a hopeless situation. Then came from somewhere an albatross breathing hope and cheer. The bird became the sailors' friend. It came whenever they called it "for food or play." A unique bond developed between the men and the bird. That bond was shot to death by a sailor one day. He took his "cross-bow" and sent an arrow straight into the heart of the trust that had developed between the men and the bird. Wanton brutality. So human! The sailor who committed the perverse act never knew peace after that. Their ship was damned. The sailors perished one by one. Our sailor survived to tell the story of his betrayal to us

Bob on my sofa Cleanliness belongs to air-conditioned rooms. Heaven must be air-conditioned since cleanliness is next to godliness. I keep my windows open so that my cats can come in and go out as they like. They do make the walls and windowsills dirty. Maggie and I clean the places regularly as well as we can. My cats make the sofa covers dirty. It’s my duty to wash the covers regularly while Maggie cooks food for me and our cats. We are happy, cats and us. Our relatives have problems, however. How can we keep the house clean with all these cats around? Our hearts are clean, friends. We keep our house clean too. But if you notice a cat’s pawprint somewhere on the floor tiles or smell a kitten on the sofa covers, please understand that love has its limitations like tolerance. I have seen children’s toys leaving footprints all over. Love leaves stains like paw prints. Where there is love, there will inevitably be some footprints. Air-conditioned rooms are clean. They have

Andrew Potok is a blind man who lives in Vermont. Once he was a gifted painter. Then an inherited eye disease slowly corroded his vision. He was devastated. He thought it was the end of the world for him. In his own words, "I thought I'd go down and hit rock bottom and get stuck in the mud." When one door closes, another opens. In fact, many doors may open. Life isn't too cruel. Potok realised that he could write as well as he painted. He says he had a dream in which colours metamorphosed into words. He awoke from the dream with the realisation that something new was possible. He began to write and people liked what he wrote. "I saw myself as a newly empowered person," Potok wrote in his autobiographical book, Ordinary Daylight: Portrait of an Artist Going Blind. Potok paints with words now and he is a happy person in spite of his blindness which undoubtedly is a debilitating handicap. Blindness slows down everything, he says. The blind person will feel the

The death of the former chief minister of Kerala, Oommen Chandy, led to an unexpected holiday today. So I picked up a book to read, out of the three in the waiting list. The Upside of Irrationality by Dan Ariely was my choice this morning. The other two may require more concentration than I can muster today: Ivory Thone by Manu S Pillai and The Journey Home by Radhanath Swami. “International bestselling author” Ariely hasn’t caught my fancy yet. What prompted me to buy Ariely’s book is its subtitle: ‘The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home’. Human irrationality, including mine, is something that has made me think a lot. Ariely doesn’t seem to have many interesting things to say about the subject, I feel. Maybe, I should be more patient. Chapter 2 discusses the meaning of labour. How many people find their jobs significantly meaningful? Your job can have Meaning with a capital M or meaning with a small m. The former implies that your work affects a large nu