Tomichan Matheikal's blog

It was the eeriness of the song that woke up Kavita. She looked at the time on her mobile phone. 1.23 am. Ah, there’s something musical about that number too. The song came from the hill behind her house. Kavita and her husband Vijay had shifted their residence to this village just a few days back. They worked in the city but didn’t like to live in the city. They would agree with Shelley that hell must be a city. The city is a roaring rage, Kavita said to Vijay many a time. I want the sound of cicadas in the night coming from green all around me. Vijay found her a lush green habitat. Kavita was the music of his life. Her desire was a command for him. No wish of hers would go unfulfilled as long as Vijay had the ability to fulfil it. You want the saugandhika and I will go to Gandharvamadana to get it. That was Vijay. Kavita’s own Vijay. When he took this lovely house on rent, Vijay was warned that the hill that towered behind the house was haunted. A haunted hill? No, not the wh

The Malayalam poem which inspired this post A poem that I read in a Malayalam journal yesterday continues to haunt me up to this moment. A very short poem, just 16 short lines, it is titled Rahim and Ram . Unable to catch sleep, Ram is wriggling convulsively in his new temple. From beneath the temple’s sanctum sanctorum rises the adhan in the fractured voice of a mosque’s debris. Rahim apologises to Ram and says, ‘This is the Kali Yug. Its humans don’t know that we are merely characters created by poets.’ This afternoon a young friend sent me a query on WhatsApp. “Is objective truth the same as objective reality?” My response: The Ram Temple in Ayodhya is objective reality. But is it objective truth? The first prime minister of India asserted vehemently that India did not need more gods and temples. He said dams were modern India’s temples and went on to construct the Nagarjuna Sagar, the Hirakud, the Damodar Valley dams, etc. When some malicious person infiltrated the Babri Mas

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so

  I was planning to take a holiday from my #WriteAPageADay commitment today when a friend’s message on WhatsApp woke me up this morning with the blow of a sledgehammer. The message was sent last night. As I am an early sleeper, it got my attention only this morning. And I decided that the message demanded more than a personal response, because I’m being bombarded with similar views from many sources these days. The crux of the message is this: As times change, politics need change too. Congress has lost itself. Marxism is redundant now. The right-wing politics of BJP is the ideal option for today’s India. “ If the majority Muslim countries can be declared Islamist, India (Bharat) can also declare herself Hindu Rashtra .” The message was written and sent by a Christian who is the principal of a Christian school in Bengaluru. He is a knowledgeable person with a doctorate in English literature, the morality of Thomas Hardy’s fatalism being his specialisation. I read his message l

About twenty years ago, I made my first trek in the Garhwal Himalayas. Hemkunt, at an elevation of 15,000 feet above sea level was our destination. The principal of my school in Delhi at that time was a passionate mountaineer and it was he who arranged this, and later a few more, trek for the senior students and their teachers. I was not quite enthusiastic initially because I doubted my stamina to make the climbs. But I was happy that I went on those treks. I am happier now, looking back. They were quite unique and rare experiences. The first time in my life that I stood on the side of the highway and looked at the queer phenomenon of the Alaknanda and the Bhagirathi Rivers merging into one to become the Ganga at Devprayag was during that Hemkunt trip. It was queer because the Alaknanda is a crystal-clear river while the Bhagirathi is always turbulent. Their sources make the difference. The source is important. When I saw a picture of Devprayag in a Malayalam journal this morni

The Saint is a short story written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It tells us the story of a man named Margarito Duarte who spent 22 years of his life striving to get his daughter canonised by the Catholic Church, to no avail.   The girl had died at the age of 7 due to a fever. A few years after her death, her grave is opened because the cemetery in which she is buried is going to be taken over for the construction of a dam. Margarito wants to bury her bones elsewhere just as all other people of the place were doing with the bones of their departed ones. When the grave was dug open came the surprise. The miracle. Eleven years after her burial, the girl’s body showed no sign of decay. The body shows “a little girl dressed as a bride who was still sleeping after a long stay underground. Her skin was smooth and warm, and her open eyes were clear and created the unbearable impression that they were looking at us from death.” The body exudes fragrance of fresh-cut roses. Everyone in th

I had a friend in Shillong whose favourite joke was about people not having enough time. A man was rushing. My friend asks him, “Why are you in such a hurry, man?” The response is, my friend says in his inimitable cynical way, “To reach home where he has nothing to do.” Nothing to do is one of the greatest challenges of 21 st century. Machines will do everything. Machines will wash your clothes, do your dishes, warm up your ready-to-cook food which in turn was made by another machine, clean your house in the meanwhile, drive you to your office, do most of your work in the office… Soon Artificial Intelligence will take over even the little work you have in office. My students have already started submitting works written by Google’s Bard or Chat GPT for their project assignments. The charm of the whole affair is that these young fellas will teach you a lesson and more if you question them about the rightness of what they are doing. “Will you sweep your room if you have a robot to