Tomichan Matheikal's blog

  We live in a political system that reduces us into mere numbers. In India, your Aadhar number is your identity. Whether you want to travel by train or flight, you need this number. In fact, you can do nothing without that one number which in turn is connected to a host of other numbers like your bank account, driving license and income tax payments. Even to be admitted in a hospital for treatment, you need your Aadhar. What this number implies is that the political system is not interested in you as an individual. Its sole interest is what it can extract out of you: taxes and votes. Have you ever received a birthday greeting from your government? A get-well wish when you are in hospital, let alone a query whether you need any assistance? Votes and taxes. You are valuable only for the sake of those two things. Otherwise, you are just another pawn on the board or a cog on a gear. To make sure that you remain just that – a pawn, a cog – the system bombards you with all sorts of pr

Pic from Pixabay In psychologist Erik Erikson’s theory, a sense of fulfilment is the sign of a happy old age. As one moves into the latter half of his/her sixties, if one feels contented with one’s own life so far, the old age is going to be ‘cool’. Otherwise, discontentment or even despair is one’s lot in the last years of life. Very few may achieve a sense of complete satisfaction with their own life towards the end. When we look back, there may be causes for regrets. I am a sexagenarian myself racing to the final stage of life as listed by Erikson. When I look back, I can see blunders after blunders committed by me in my youth as well as my adulthood. My growing into maturity was a slow and tedious process. Painful too, quite often. But am I going to sit down and feel regrets? No. “Regret is a temptation,” says Joan Chittister, author of The Gift of Years: Growing Older Gracefully . Regret, she goes on to say, “entices us to lust for what never was in the past rather than to b

 Mahatma Gandhi belonged to the 20th century. He was arguably the saint of that century.  76 years ago,  o n this very day - 30 Jan - he was assassinated brutally by a misguided and perverted ideology which, unfortunately, has laid siege to contemporary India, thereby assassinating the spirit of Gandhi again and again.  Allow me to present a few images here on this death anniversary of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. These images have little to do with Gandhi himself. But they have much to do with what he was trying to teach the world about things such as development without heart, greed without limit, craze for power and self-aggrandizement, political chicanery... The rich and powerful have all the goodies and buddies. The poor are plundered of everything, even their food. When a few choose to live life kingsize, the majority get trampled under their boots. [The images may have little to do with Gandhi directly, as I've already said. Nor with India per se.] Two faces of religion in th

A friend sent me an e-book this afternoon: The Gift of Years by Joan Chittister. I’ve only read the introduction and I think I’ll love this book which is about old age. Growing Older Gracefully is its subtitle. The author questions in the introduction the general notion about life being one linear progression from birth to death. “What we did yesterday, what we do today, cannot be undone.” This is deadly thinking, Chittister says. It sets our future in cement by freezing our successes and failures in eternal measures. Fixed once and for all. “My life has been nothing but a series of new beginnings,” she asserts. Every day can be a new day, a new beginning. This moment can be a new beginning. As I was reading this part of the introduction, a parable from Tony D’Mello came to my mind. I’m modifying the parable a bit to avoid the hunting mentioned in the original. I don’t like the idea of anyone shooting down a bird. So I shall make it an innocuous ball. A man was training his

Republic Day gave me a holiday after a long time. I used it for cleaning up my personal library. One of the tragic fates of books is they don’t stay with you for long. I lost most of my books because of the changes of my job-places. When I left Shillong in 2001, I left most of my books behind; I sold them to a college library. It wasn’t easy to transport things from the Northeast in those days. Moreover, my psychological condition was worse than my economic condition at that time and I sold whatever I could in order to get away from a place that had become a veritable hell for me. A few books were carried, however, to Delhi, my new place. I was going to Delhi without any hope. Nobody had offered me any job there. Maggie’s brother was there and he said, “Come if you wish.” He was more than kind. Magnanimous. Probably, he was concerned about his sister. I couldn’t obviously carry too many things to my brother-in-law’s flat in Delhi. That’s the major reason I got rid of my books. Bu

I love grapes. Right from the grapevines to the final product of grape fruits in the farms, and furthermore the wine that some of the most creative people invented from that pearly fruit, everything about grapes sounds like some medieval witchcraft to me. I have been seeing grapes on sale at the rate of Rs100 for 2 kg wherever I go these days. I didn’t go beyond 50 km from home on these days. That’s why the offer surprised me all the more. Grapes in my rural neighbourhood at such low rates sounds an alert. So I didn’t buy any of those. But when I found them at a higher price this evening in a hypermarket, I bought half a kg after enough dawdling. “Are these sweet?” I asked the staff. “Sweet and sour,” she said. “A bit sour,” she explained when I looked sceptical. When I tasted them at home, after soaking them in salt water for half an hour and then washing them three times in running water as instructed by Maggie, they tasted like the pesticide in the vegetables I usually get

Book Review Title: Dudiya: In Your Burning Land Author: Vishwas Patil Translator: Nadeem Khan Publisher: Niyogi Books, New Delhi, 2023 Pages: 220 According to official data, 25% of India’s land is forest. In reality, only 12% is forest. The rest has been encroached on by the corporate sector with the permission of the government. Even the Modi government which pretends to be corruption-free and idealistic has altered the forest laws in order to hand over certain forest land to some corporate bigwigs under various guises including environment protection! The people who are most affected by these shady deals between the Indian government and the corporate sector are the tribals and Adivasis living in the forests. This novel by Vishwas Patil, written originally in Marathi, is about these shady affairs in the forests of the country, particularly in Dandakaranya in Chhattisgarh. Dudiya is a real character, an Adivasi woman whose people were betrayed first by the government