Tomichan Matheikal's blog

One of the many paradoxes of human life is that many people who are overtly religious may have the vilest evils lurking beneath their overt behaviour. Such evils may never become manifest in external behaviour since they remain successfully suppressed by the religiosity of the person.   The same is true of morality.   Conversely, many people who are not overtly religious or moralistic may be much better at heart than those who display virtues in their external behaviour. Ibsen’s play, A Doll’s House , depicts this paradox. Ibsen died in 1906.   The play was originally published in 1879.   It is classical enough to grip our imagination and exercise our minds even today. Helmer, the protagonist, is a morally upright person, a man of honour.   No one will accuse him of any fault.   Yet when his wife, Nora, leaves him in the end returning the wedding ring, he sinks into the chair crying “Empty!.”   It is his inner emptiness that he has to confront now, the exemplariness of his exte

‘Should Wizard Hit Mommy?’ is a short story by John Updike.   It’s prescribed by CBSE as a lesson for class 12 students.   CBSE’s interpretation of the lesson is as silly as any interpretation can get to.   The story is about a family.   Jack the father, Clare the mother, and Jo the daughter. Jo is just 4 years old.   Jack tells her the bedtime stories.   He also tells her stories on Saturday afternoons for her nap. One Saturday afternoon he tells her the story of Roger Skunk whose problem is his stench which keeps other animals away.   He is not able to make friends because of his stench. The wizard solves the problem by transforming the smell into the fragrance of roses. Jo is happy with the story and would have gone to sleep had it not been for Jack who was unhappy with the resolution of Roger Skunk’s problem.   How can a skunk smell like roses?   He won’t be a skunk.   His identity will be lost. So Jack continued the story.   Roger Skunk’s mother took her boy back to

Teaching extends far beyond the classroom A few of my students on the bank of the Ganga The above ad appeared in today’s [10 Sep] Times of India ( Ascent , the job vacancies supplement).   The school wants both teachers and “coaching experts.”   While the teachers will be paid a salary of Rs 22,000 per month, the coaching experts will be paid from “Rs 9 Lac to 12 Lac” annually.   Moreover, “Higher start can be considered for highly deserving candidates” in the case of coaching experts – but apparently not in the case of teachers.   As a teacher I was amused by the discrepancy between the remunerations of a tutor and a teacher.   The job of the tutor (or coaching expert, as the ad calls him/her) is to prepare “students competing for Board Exams & for IIT, AIEEE, PMT, NDA etc.” Why is there so much discrepancy between the remunerations, I wondered naturally.   Is it tougher to prepare students for competitive exams than teach them the subject, instil values in them

From NIM, Uttarkashi “I’M IN MY PRIME, THERE’S NO GOAL TOO FAR / NO MOUNTAIN TOO HIGH,” says a quote from Wilma Rudolf, displayed on the campus of the Nehru Institute of Mountaineering (NIM) at Uttarkashi in the Uttarakhand state of India.      Uttarkashi was the base camp of our Himalayan trekking simply because our tour manager has a resort in that place.   The resort consists of permanent tents which look like temporary ones.   The look is important.   We live in a world that gives much importance to looks.   The hospitality, however, was of 5-star standard.   The resort can indeed boast of a high standard.   My students were happy with the facilities provided there.   They love appearances.   Illusions are real at the age of 16 or 17. Our bus backtracked from here What I wanted, however, was the rough trekking and the challenge it would provide to my aging body.   We started our journey from the star-class resort in Uttarkashi toward Gangotri by the two buses that we

“Welcome to the Land of Gods” is a signboard that will greet you the moment you reach the Garhwal Himalayas.   What Arun Kolatkar wrote about Jejuri is quite true about the Garhwal Himalayas too: “what is god / and what is stone / the dividing line / if it exists / is very thin / at jejuri / and every other stone / is god or his cousin” (in the poem, A Scratch ). On my way to Gomukh from Gangotri My recent trekking to Gomukh with a group of 35 students taught me quite many a lesson about gods of all hues including wealth. We started our trekking from Gangotri soon after breakfast.   Gangotri, as the name implies, is (supposed to be) the origin of the holy river Ganga.   We had reached Gangotri a day before our trekking with enough time left for a wandering in the holy mount.   One of the places that caught our fancy during our wandering was the wooden cabin of a Baba (sage) who lives very close to the place where the Ganga spouted forth lustily through the gap between two r

When I took up my present job in Delhi at the age of 41, leaving my previous job in a romantic place like Shillong, what I really wanted was a nice place to live and enough money too.   It didn’t take me much time to find the present place and job which fulfilled both conditions.   An excellent campus (a school) with more greenery than most schools in Delhi can afford.   What Providence (I am an agnostic, please) gave me was better than what I had expected.   A green campus, enough place to move around even in the kitchen of the accommodation that was provided, and – best of all – a cool environment all along the scooter ride from where the city ends (Chattarpur).   I used to love those scooter rides.   Even my wife did! That was 11 years ago.   Today, I wouldn’t like to go out of the campus.   The moment I step out it’s the devil of a dust that greets me anywhere.   Gone are the days of a nice environment.   The environment has been killed.   The marble industry took over the

The wicked grow like the palm tree.   Grow taller and higher and mightier.   The Bible says that, though not in the same words.   Reliance Communications has been awarded the ‘Best Quality of Service Award’ for the 2 nd consecutive year at ET Telecom Awards 2012.   Thank you . The above message landed in the Inbox of my Reliance mobile phone which connection I’ve been sticking to out of necessity for eleven years.   I added a line to that message and sent it as many friends as possible.   The line I added is: Not much money was reqd to buy d award! Reliance must have bought the award.   Capitalism is about buying and selling, and not quality of service or professional ethics, let alone moral values. While I cannot complain about the services of Reliance mobile phone, I have a whole lot of complaints about the company’s internet services.   I wrote earlier too about it.   For example, Corporate Greed – Reliance Style .   I have a Reliance 3G net connection.   This co

I am a teacher in an exclusively residential boy’s public school in Delhi.   The parents of each of my students pay an annual fee of about Rs 200,000.   That’s nothing much compared to the fees charged by international schools in Delhi. Yet that’s quite a lot compared to the annual per capita income of an Indian.   So I, as a teacher in such a school, would expect certain standard of behaviour from my students.   For example, I would expect that the students want value for the money that their parents are paying ( paisa wasool , is that the right phrase?)   I would expect my students to gain as much as they can from the classes, from the sprawling playgrounds (which most Delhi schools cannot afford), and from the very routine of a residential school. What do I, as a teacher, actually see?   I see my students trying to bunk off from classes.   Ok, you can blame the teacher for not trying to make the classes as interesting as Kapil Sibal’s CCE envisages them to be.   I see my stud

In 1978, the Catholic theologian Hans Kung raised a few pertinent questions in his book, Does God Exist?   “Has religion any future?   Can we not have morality even without religion?   Is not science sufficient?   Has not religion developed out of magic?   Will it not perish in the process of evolution?   Is not God from the outset a projection of man (Feuerbach), opium of the people (Marx), resentment of those who have fallen short (Nietzsche), illusion of those who have remained infantile (Freud)? …” The decades that followed proved that the theologian’s anxieties were ill-founded.   Religious fundamentalism of all sorts flourished in the 1990s all over the world.   The communist USSR collapsed politically as well as ideologically, and people began to flock toward religions perhaps in order to fill the vacuum left by the Marxist ideology that had vanished.   Samuel P Huntington says in his book The Clash of Civilizations and the remaking of world order , “In 1994, 30 percent

The team that was supposed to make an inventory of the treasures stored in one of the cellars of the Sri Padmanabha Swami Temple in Thiruvananthapuram was prevented today (20 Sep) from executing its job simply because there were women in it.   When some members of the team pointed out that the earlier inventory was also done by a team consisting of women, they were told curtly that it was a serious mistake and the purification rituals would be carried out soon. Why are women impure?   Most religions have considered women as the source of much evil.   The very beginning of the Bible shows Eve as the cause of man’s Fall .   Neither Judaism which gave birth to the Old Testament nor Christianity which adopted the Old Testament as part of its sacred scriptures has ever given women equality with men.   For example, there are no women priests in both religions.   The most telling verdict on women was passed by one of the Catholic theologians, Tertullian (160-220).   He said, “Do you

A busy shopping complex.   Everyone is busy.   Everyone is in a hurry. Everyone is shopping.   Everyone is shopping with credit cards and debit cards. An old woman was in the queue at the delivery counter.   She had the debit card given by the FDI outlet. “Your identification number, madam,” said the counter-boy. “But… Ramu, I’m your mother!” said the woman.

When The Satanic Verses went about kicking up more dust and storm than a (commercial) publication could afford to, Salman Rushdie, the author, wrote many an article about freedom of expression.       In one such article he argued that the freedom of expression necessarily implies the freedom to hurt feelings.   Otherwise it wouldn’t be freedom.   And he’s right.   More or less at the same time he wrote another article titled “Is nothing sacred?”   For him, said the article, only bread and books are sacred: food for the body as well as the mind. Sanctity is almost always an attribute; it is attributed by us human beings to certain entities.   There are 330 million gods in India.   Apart from them we have rivers, mountains, caves, trees, and umpteen other things which are supposed to be sacred.   Is India sacred?   If it is, which India is it?   Is it the India represented by the Parliament (the elected leaders)?   Is it the Constitution of the country?   Is it the national symb