Elephants in a Sugarcane Field

Prof Vattamattam helps us understand our deepest fears, desires and actions.

At sixteen, Sebastian Vattamattam is diagnosed with rheumatic heart disease. Confined for two years, reading is his only solace. One day, he learns from a magazine that patients like him rarely live beyond twenty-five. In his eighties now, Sebastian’s faith in death—its certainty, its promise—has rescued him from despair. He has spent decades teaching in schools and colleges in Goa, Nigeria, Qatar and Changanassery, developing a taste for philosophy—the love of knowledge.

Elephants in a Sugarcane Field leans on two thinkers, Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek, to come to terms with questions that confound us. How does a grand temple uphold the fantasy that nothing is wrong with our social reality? Why are sexually abusive terms directed at mothers and sisters so universal? What does language hide and reveal at once? Is nirvana real? How does God fill the emptiness in us? Do psychoanalysis and Vipassana converge? Does ideology govern human life like gravity governs the universe? What is the void?

Sebastian Vattamattam was born in Neyyassery village, Thodupuzha, Kerala, in 1945. He has taught mathematics in schools and colleges in Goa, Nigeria, Qatar and Changanassery. He has authored several books in Malayalam and English. Prof Vattamattam lives in Ettumanoor, Kottayam, and is the convener of Ettumanoor Kavya Vedi (The Ettumanoor Forum of Poets).