THE INDIAN COMMENTATOR

This is a recent case of girl child missing , from Star City , West Virginia , the  United States . This picture says it all. I uploaded it from my Facebook page. I spotted this picture shared on one of my friend’s wall. I shared it on to my Facebook timeline from there, thinking it would be helpful for some aching hearts to find out where their only panacea, their lovely daughter, is. Image Courtesy: Google This picture has been added on this blog, to create more chances of finding Skylar Neese . And to let the family know people do care about them, even if they are miles away, on the other part of the world. The news and search of Skylar Neese’s disappearance reminded me of a book I read about three months back: Harlan Coben’s novel Caught . I had announced a book review before two months on this book. Due to some reasons this review could not be posted until now. However, with this post my intention is to renew that promise and to let you know that the r...

Image courtesy: Google Teaching English at a local college provides me the necessary income for survival, since my books have not started their earning journey into the wide and wondrous world, yet. Still, I must say, teaching provides me not just money, but the experience as a person undertaking a professional responsibility. This experience amalgamates the innate creative impulses into a literary text exhibiting order, alignment, pattern and style, elements that are much needed in any writer’s success journey.   Even if I hadn’t taken this job up, I would have learnt these elements, but perhaps in the hard way, who knows. Doing any other job, while pursuing a writer’s life, can bring to the surface a similar set of experiences that at a second stage, can culminate into a writing genius. I hope the story I am going to tell here, might influence, inspire and help move forward many like myself, who at some unfortunate turn in their lives, are forced to believe they are ...

Image Courtesy: Google Wayanad is the third in the column of fourteen districts that form the state of Kerala, located between Calicut and Western Ghats , if counted from North. Wayanad is famous for its coffee beans, paddy fields, tea estates, the hills, forest, valleys and streams. Wayanad is notorious for farmer suicides, as well. There had been another diabolic issue, for the past one month that the district was notoriously conspicuous in the news media for—a tiger. On the second of December 2012, the Forest Guardians shot it dead. Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry? There is a story behind it. It had been one month; the news of a tiger roaming free in the residential areas in Wayanad had been celebrated and anticipated along with each morning’s cozy tea in each household outside Wayanad, throughout Kerala. There was nothing literally sarcastic about the celebration of this new...

“That is why its name was called Babel , because there Jehovah had confused the language of all the earth, and Jehovah had scattered them from there over all the surface of the earth.”—Genesis 11:9 Image Courtesy: Google This is one of the most puzzling of questions. Some of you might have thought of it as a brain twister, just a labyrinth of infinite contemplation with no definite answers. To a certain extent you are right in thinking so. The reason to say this will follow and we will learn it, perhaps, at the end of this passage. In significant books such as the Holy Bible , there are spots where history, science, philosophy, religion, spirituality, and psychology all merge to create a single event. One such moment is when Jehovah God said, “Look! They are one people and there is one language for them all, and this is what they start to do.” [Genesis 11:6] God said it looking at how the  descendants  of Noah, who settled in the plain valley in the land of Shina...

Statutory warning: Those who can’t afford to risk their temperaments with hardcore cultural satire, please close this tab by clicking at the ‘X’ button on your right.  Image Courtesy: Google Cultural differences are interesting to watch and study. Sometimes, they are as excruciating an experience as watching news in any Malayalam TV channel. At the same time, occasionally, these differences are humorous to observe as well. For example, the social science text book I studied for my eighth standard, says that Kerala is the America in India in the standard of living, and later in my Masters programme, I learnt that it is not just in standard of living, but in many aspects, such as cultural diversity and the way every culture is assimilated into its mother culture, this state is just like the melting pot, America. Well, this can be said about the general Indian cultural context as well. Whoever you are, whichever religion you belong to, you have to rub the sandal past...

Image Courtesy: Telegraph.co.uk What I intend to talk about is the chasm between what one believes and one talks about in a teacher’s life. What inspired me to think in this stream is the post I made in my blog lately. It was about how a poem by Rabindranath Tagore has been taught in colleges and universities and how I see it. The poem is never given its spiritual significance and is never placed against the realities of the formless world one is constantly in contact with, the world of spirituality, or the worlds of psychic realities. Spirituality gives us glimpses of what lies beyond what we know and see in form around us, in the so-called physical world. Another route to reach to those non-formal realities or non-physical realities is psychic reality—the unique world of the mind. Teaching this poem or any other book, the teacher is forced to tell the students about the ideas and ideological backgrounds that supposedly played crucial roles in writing of a particular ...

I  never had much guest posts in my blog. From what I recall, it was only once, and it was from Fernando Pessoa , the well-known and Portuguese poet. It was a passage written by him that I included, years back. At this moment, I think about guest posts again. The reason is very extraordinary and simple at the same time. For the past few days I have been thinking a line from a poem by an Indian poet. This is the line “ Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high .” This line is from Rabindranath Tagore’s Githanjali, a collection of spiritual songs, for which he won the Nobel Prize for literature. He was the first and last Indian to bring the Nobel here. But that doesn’t count as much as how deep his verses are. None of the other poets in the tradition of Indian English literature have been able to bring such a depth within such a concise verse format.    I taught this poem at the university and studied it myself as a young graduate. In all these yea...

Image Courtesy: Google Without any impersonal, undramatic statements, or any negations of any of my previous blog descriptions, I change my existing blog description, “My Freedom is your Beauty” to “is an act of finding an extension for existence.” I subsequently changed my background image as well, along with some of the colours of the titles. The question, if these changes can carry any significant difference in the contents of the blog or in the furthering of the different dimensions of existence, can only be answered by time. But if one looks at the current Description, “…is an act of finding an extension for existence,” one can get a glimpse of the truth that lay hidden before us in time. This fragment of sentence, with its hidden subject acts as a reminder of all human present, the idea we all understand as ‘now’. In our ephemeral, yet eternal moments of the present, the now, the beginning and the results are unknown to us, kept away from us, sometimes buried in our m...

Image Courtesy: Facebook Procrastination is one of the dramatic catalysts that work its way through to the development of plot in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The postponement of action drew Hamlet from normal struggles to madness. Of course, it adds to the drama. However, procrastination is no good a prop in a writer’s arsenal. His characters, of course can exhibit this as a favourable character flaw. But he himself should be kept away from this character trait. Image Courtesy: Google Procrastination, evidently, is not a character trait at all; however, for the use of a better word, we can use the phrase--‘character trait’. Whatever the reason is, when someone decides today’s job to be done tomorrow, he or she is procrastinating the work. It mainly results from the blind confidence of a tomorrow that is at the same time favourable and secured, as imagined by the writer. Here, it is good to remember John 9:4, “One must work the works of him that sent me while it is day; the ...

Image Courtesy: Google Image Courtesy: Google Are you a lover of thrillers? Have your senses adapted enough to understand the line where characters and plot become one and where characters trace their trajectories straight into the readers’ hearts? This second question is especially complicated, since even some writers cannot point out where this line is. The best demonstrative strategy is to take you to some of the books as instances that unsettled the world and left it on the mercy of imaginative survival; The Da Vinci Code for example or Hunger Games . We loved their story line, their plot and of course, Robert Langdon or Katniss Everdeen, they are vulnerable and their pain is intimate for us. Image Courtesy: Google The Krishna Key is based on conspiracy theories that suggest that the Vedic civilization is the mother of all civilizations. Aswin Sanghy compares the idea of a supreme and extremely developed civilization to the lost city of Atlantis . By doing thi...

Image Courtesy: Google Cannanore will soon become a big city, but right now, it is a small town, where people still prefer having their tea, coffee and meals from coffee houses that stinks of urine, sweat and smoke. This is not the only reason for naming it small. Every city is like a human being. And like humans, cities have thoughts as well. Cannanore town is small is its thoughts too. Thoughts of a city are its streets. The streets in Cannanore city are quite narrow and thus I deduced my conclusion that it is indeed a small in city, small in size and small in mind. In this small town, one evening, a coffee house was busy as a slaughter house. The slaughter house imagery partially owes its credit to the way people’s faces looked after their sojourn inside the houses for tea or meals and their puffed up pot bellies and partly it owed to the vast number of people flowing in and out. A person in a wrinkled grey shirt walked faster towards the entrance. He placed the b...