Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Maggie and I on the way to Hemkund Trekking in the Garhwal Himalayas is both fun and adventure. Thanks to the school in Delhi where I taught for a considerable period of my life, I got opportunities to climb many a peak in the Himalayas along with groups of young students. The best was the Hemkund trek. Hemkund is a glacial lake that lies about 15,000 feet (4572 metres) above sea level in the Himalayas. It’s a Sikh pilgrimage centre dedicated to the tenth Guru, Gobind Singh (1666-1708). There is a gurudwara on the bank of the lake. It is a two-day trek for ordinary folk who are not professional trekkers in the mountains. You climb about three-fourth of the total distance on day one. The trek starts from Joshimath, the place that was in news two years ago because of the catastrophic floods and landslides that wreaked unprecedented havoc in the mountains. Joshimath itself is at an altitude of 6150 feet (1875 metres). Our bus carried us up to Joshimath from where we started the trek

A Palestinian child whose dear ones were killed Pic from Malayalam weekly   They are killing each other because their gods are different. Each of the gods is a jealous entity. Yahweh, the God of the Jews, admitted his own jealousy. He told the Jews, his chosen race, “For you shall worship no other god, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God.” [Exodus 20:4] Allah of Islam makes no less claims. While Yahweh allows other gods to exist, Allah apparently isn’t as generous as that. La ilaha illallah. Both these gods together have caused endless misery on the earth. They have made their chosen people squeamishly narrowminded and incapable of living in harmony with others. Why on earth did anyone think of putting these two people together on a desert? Mahatma Gandhi was right. He was against the creation of Israel as a country for the Jews. He was not one who would give credence to fairy tales such as a race being God’s favourite and so on. “I am not moved by the argument that the Jews

Let me start with a disclaimer. This is not a book review though I’m relying on Royston Lambert’s book , Beloved and God (1984) for most of the information contained in this post. The eponymous hero of the book is Antinous who died in his early 20s. Soon after his death he became a God in the Roman Empire because he was the beloved of Emperor Hadrian . What I wish to highlight is how a god can be created pretty easily and how the religion founded in his name can become popular too as easily. I think my country’s present leaders can take some lessons from here. Hadrian was quite a good emperor. A benevolent dictator, in the judgment of many historians. He did very many good things for the benefit of his people instead of going around conquering more territories. [China too can learn something.] One of those many things was giving the people a new god and religion. He did much better things earlier, of course. Antinous was an adolescent boy when Hadrian’s eyes fell on him first

There are two worlds for each one of us. One where there is order, purpose, love, and joy. The plain truth is that this world of goodness is our own creation. We create the order, the purpose, and all the rest of it. Then there is the second world, a ruthless one which is beyond our control. The Goods and Services Tax (GST), the occasional floods and landslides, deadly viruses, and the Enforcement Directorate. And a lot more, of course. Confronted with the horrors and terrors of this second world, we seek solace and some sort of spiritual belief comes to our aid easily. It’s so facile to believe that there is a God sitting somewhere up there bringing this second world under some kind of control in response to our prayers. Mark Twain found this God too infantile to accommodate. In his book Letters from the Earth , Twain made Satan visit the earth. Twain’s Satan is astounded to find that humans think God is watching them. As if God has nothing else to do than watch some silly crea

  Book Review Title: The Himadripuram Adventure Author: Sitharaam Jayakumar Goodness should win in the end of all conflicts. That classical notion has been illustrated brilliantly and imaginatively once more in this rather short novel by a good friend of mine. Himadripuram is an imaginary kingdom that existed in a time when there was no electricity, no motor vehicles, and not even a postal system. That is a kind of romantic world. I mean the romance in the second of the meanings below.  There is a fairly good king in Himadripuram. But his tenure is coming to an end. His son will take charge soon. However, that son, Veer Narayan, is an immature teenager who is a “combination of stupidity, greed and ambition.” The King, Devdutt Narayan, tries his best to drive some sense into the head of the crown prince, but to no avail. The King has to deal with another challenge too: an emerging rebellion led by people who are deviously powerful. What if you have enemies within your family

Image from cleanpng.com The latest raid by India’s ED [Enforcement Directorate] on NewsClick and the arrest of its founder remind me strangely of Joseph Heller’s character named Orr in the novel Catch-22 . Orr and Yossarian are both in the US Air Force. Now Yossarian is in the hospital undergoing treatment. The war is going on and hence Yossarian, like most other soldiers, would love the treatment to go on endlessly. Yossarian’s pain in his liver refuses to become jaundice. “If it became jaundice they could treat it. If it didn’t become jaundice and went away they could discharge him.” Orr is Yossarian’s roommate. When Orr was a kid he used to walk around all day with crab apples in his cheeks, he says. Yossarian wants to know why. Orr says it’s because crab apples are better than horse chestnuts. Yossarian repeats his question. Why would anyone walk around all day with anything in his cheeks? “I didn’t,” Orr says, “walk around with anything in my cheeks. I walked around wit

Book Review Title: Soft Animal Author: Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan Publisher: Penguin Random House India, 2023 Pages: 261   Very many people – too many, in fact – live partial lives. That is, most people don’t explore the depths of anything: the meaning of their life, of their love, of their religion, whatever. There is no passion about anything. Consequently, life becomes dull, even painful. This novel is about the dull pain experienced by a woman in her mid-thirties. She is married to a rich man who was in a love-relationship with her for long enough before marriage. He is an IT professional and she is a homemaker. Mukund Chugh and Mallika Rao. A rich Punjabi boy and the not-so-rich “south Indian girl” (as her in-laws refer to her). Mukund is a good guy. Mallika, the first-person narrator tells us that “All my life I had wanted to be with someone like Mukund, someone so sure of themselves and their identity.” But disillusionment follows soon enough. Entering into married