Tomichan Matheikal's blog

With some former students One of the happiest things in a teacher’s life is former students contacting after many years to show their affection. It so happened that two of my former students texted me on WhatsApp yesterday. One of them was a poet while at school. I once featured her in this same space with one of her poems, Where do old birds go to die? Yesterday, she texted me to say, “I wrote something after ages… Hope you’ll read and let me know what you think.” She is a student of literature now in a prominent college of Kerala. She has learned professors of literature as her present teachers. But when she sought the opinion of her schoolteacher, I had reason to feel proud of myself. And her story is excellent. Let me give you the link: Wounds . As I read the last line of the story, the first question that sprang to my mind was: O my god! Why don’t we have this sort of students anymore? I quit teaching precisely because I couldn’t find the classroom rewarding in any way. Un

  The railway station from where I embarked my first train is now defunct. Cochin (today Kochi) Harbour Terminus. It was 21 June 1975, just four days prior to the declaration of Emergency in India by Indira Gandhi. I was 15 years old and had just completed my schooling. I was part of a large contingent of equally young boys who were being taken to Don Bosco’s school and seminary at a place called Tirupattur in Tamil Nadu. We were all aspirants of priesthood. There was a year-long process of initiation at Tirupattur after which we would return to Kerala to continue our normal secular education. Since the group was pretty large and none of us had reservation on the train, we were all asked to reach the Terminus from where the Madras (today Chennai) Express would start. Since the Terminus was the starting station, all seats in the general compartment would be empty and we were supposed to find seats in that compartment. Hardly any passenger would take the trouble of travelling to th

The only difference between death and taxes is that death doesn’t get worse every time the finance minister presents the annual budget. A good part of your earning is extracted by your government as taxes: income tax, GST, land tax, house tax, luxury tax, poverty tax… That is an endless list. Even when you buy your medicines, the government will pickpocket a share at the rate of 12%. The last time I renewed my medical insurance, my government took about Rs6000 as GST [Goods & Services Tax]. In all progressive countries, the government spends money on welfare schemes for senior citizens. In Vishwaguru Modi’s country, the senior citizen’s blood is extracted while he tries to take care of himself. What makes me write all this today? Two staff from my Panchayat came yesterday to collect plastic waste as they do every month. They charge Rs50 for that each time they come. There is a charge for everything in this country from your birth [birth certificate and registration] to your dea

Knowledge , or wisdom rather, is a means of reaching the divine, according to the Gita. It is called Jnana Yoga. The previous two posts of this blog discussed Karma Yoga and Bhakti Yoga. The wisdom that the Gita advocates is of the spiritual kind. It is essentially the realisation of the oneness of all reality and hence the divinity of all reality. You are divine. So is the guy next to you. So too are the flowers in your garden, the bees that come to the flowers, the water that sustains your plants, the insects, the stones... What greater religion can there be than the one which bathes you in an ocean of divinity, the same ocean in which all other creatures and everything else stand bathed? Most humans don't reach such a stage of spirituality, however. We are driven by three gunas (attributes), Krishna tells Arjuna. These gunas control our actions. Tamas or delusion is a predominant guna. It is a kind of delusion. It's a kind of darkness that veils the reality preventing you f

The ultimate purpose of the Bhagavad Gita is to teach egolessness to humans. There are three ways of achieving the state of egolessness, according to the Gita. The first is Karma Yoga, which was discussed in the previous post . Today we are going to look at the second way, Bhakti Yoga, the yoga of devotion. Chapter 12 of the Gita discusses bhakti in particular though chapters 7 to 12 are more or less about bhakti and I’m going to look at that section today. Bhakti or devotion is another name for love. Bhakti yoga is the process of discovering the divine through love. The love is so intense that the devotee surrenders himself totally to the divine. As a result, the devotee begins to see the divine in everything, in every creature. All that exists is now holy for the devotee. No real devotee can distinguish between people on the basis of caste, creed, language, etc. There is no place for such divisions since everything, everyone, is an extension of the divine. The Gita speaks abo

I bought a copy of annotated Bhagavad Gita a few months back with the intention of understanding the scripture better since I’m living in a country that has become a Hindu theocracy in all but the Constitution. After reading the first part [chapters 1 to 6] which is about Karma, I gave up. Shelving a book [literally and metaphorically] is not entirely strange to me. If a book fails to appeal to me after a reasonable number of pages, I abandon it. The Gita failed to make sense to me just like any other scripture. That’s not surprising since I’m not a religious kind of a person. I go by reason. I accept poetry which is not quite rational. Art is meaningful for me though I can’t detect any logic in it. Even mysticism is acceptable. But the kind of stuff that Krishna was telling Arjuna didn’t make any sense at all. To me. Just a sample. When Arjuna says he doesn’t want to fight the war because he can’t kill his own kith and kin, Krishna’s answer is: Fight. If you are killed, you win he

Bringing up children is both an art and a science. The parents must have certain skills as well as qualities and value systems if the children are to grow up into good human beings. How do the Bollywood stars bring up their children? That is an interesting subject which probably no one studied seriously until Rashmi Uchil did. The result of her study is the book titled Raising Stars: The challenges and joys of being a Bollywood parent . The book brings us the examples of no less than 26 Bollywood personalities on how they brought up their children in spite of their hectic schedules and other demands of the profession. In each chapter, the author highlights one particular virtue or skill or quality from each of these stars to teach us about the importance of that aspect in bringing up children. Managing anger, for example, is the topic of the first chapter where Mahima Chowdhary is our example. We move on to gender equality, confidence, discipline, etc, and end with spirituality whi