Jophin Mathai
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jofmat.bsky.social
Jophin Mathai
@jofmat.bsky.social
300 followers 270 following 630 posts
philanthropy, education, social mobility, social change | amateur philosopher | I read, write, listen l posts are personal

Work at: Center for Asian Philanthropy India
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jofmat.bsky.social
Book 8: The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

I have fond memories of Kerala: a boyhood of collecting rubber milk to turn them into sheets, playing in rivers with my cousins, the fish nibbling at my skin, among other things. This year, I spent quality time there with this gem of a book.
Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story. The God of Small Things Arundhati Roy "We're Prisoners of War," Chacko said. "Our dreams have been doctored. We belong nowhere. We sail unanchored on troubled seas. We may never be allowed ashore. Our sorrows will never be sad enough. Our joys never happy enough. Our dreams never big enough. Our lives never important enough. To matter."
November 19, 2025 at 8:11 AM
jofmat.bsky.social
Book 7: Empire of Normality by
Robert Chapman

The pathology paradigm and capitalist logics reinforce each other to produce ‘disability’: differences become individual deficits rather than relational mismatches with environments. The book traces the history and dynamics of this reinforcement.
part of what I seek to show is that while capitalist societies have allowed some degree of mobility regarding social class, this has only meant that domination shifts more towards neurodivergence rather than diminishing overall. This, I argue, undermines the last promise of capitalism, which purports to help us approach a meritocracy where free individuals are valued not by their inherited status but by their virtues and how hard they work. Empire of Normality Robert Chapman Part of what follows from adopting a neurodiversity paradigm lens is the recognition that mental functioning and thus production emerges from our neurological diversity at the group level. No human is capable of doing much alone, or is wholly independent, and everything we do relies to varying extents on people who think differently having produced at least some part of what each of us uses. Empire of Normality Robert Chapman
November 19, 2025 at 8:11 AM
jofmat.bsky.social
Book 6: Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan

This is a collection of Irish short stories that reveal seismic inner lives. Like the most gifted writers, Keegan is a literary witness who makes ‘ordinary’ lives spectacular, as they truly are.
Weddings are hard. The drink flows and the words come out and he has to be there. A man loses his daughter to a younger man. A woman sees her son throwing himself away on a lesser woman. It is something they half believe. There's the expense, the sentiment, the no going back. Any time promises are made in public, people cry. Walk the Blue Fields Claire Keegan Judge is glad he cannot speak. He has never understood the human compulsion for conversation: people, when they speak, say useless things that seldom if ever improve their lives. Their words make them sad. Why can't they stop talking and embrace each other? Walk the Blue Fields Claire Keegan
November 19, 2025 at 8:11 AM
jofmat.bsky.social
Book 5: The Vegetarian by Han Kang

The protagonist abruptly decides to stop eating meat after a disturbing dream. With this premise, Kang explores social norms, patriarchal control, and the fragility of identity.
"The feeling that she had never really lived in this world caught her by surprise. It was a fact. She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had done nothing but endure. She had believed in her own inherent goodness, her humanity, and lived accordingly, never causing anyone harm. Her devotion to doing things the right way had been unflagging, all her success had depended on it, and she would have gone on like that indefinitely. She didn’t understand why, but faced with those decaying buildings and straggling grasses, she was nothing but a child who had never lived." (Han Kang, The Vegetarian)
November 18, 2025 at 3:44 PM
jofmat.bsky.social
Book 4: Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

My first Rooney, and I get the buzz. I deeply appreciate how attentively she explores class tensions, freedom and identity in her fiction.
"How often in his life he has found himself a frustrated observer of apparently impenetrable systems, watching other people participate effortlessly in structures he can find no way to enter or even understand. So often that it’s practically baseline, just normal existence for him. And this is not only due to the irrational nature of other people, and the consequent irrationality of the rules and processes they devise; it’s due to Ivan himself, his fundamental unsuitedness to life." (Sally Rooney, Intermezzo) "say if you take the example of a teacher, they go into work every day and like, teach children to read. The school isn’t making any profit, obviously, because it’s free to go there. But I think we all agree, the children should learn to read, so we better pay someone to teach them. Since that person needs to eat, and so on. If we organise everything in view of profit, we get things happening in the economy that make no sense...Like in this example, no one has a direct profit motive for teaching children, but the whole economy will collapse if people can’t read. You get the same problem with infrastructure, and all kinds of things." (Sally Rooney, Intermezzo)
November 18, 2025 at 3:44 PM
jofmat.bsky.social
Book 3: The Revolution Will Not Be Funded by Incite!

Published in 2007, and while situated in the US context, the themes and critiques explored in this book continue to be globally relevant today. Necessary reading esp for those in the nonprofit sector.

#civilsociety #philanthropy #nonprofit
"More insidious than the raw structural constraints exerted by the foundation/state/non-profit nexus is the way in which this new industry grounds an epistemology—literally, a way of knowing social change and resistance praxis—that is difficult to escape or rupture." (Incite!, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded) "Individuals who have dedicated their lives to working for social and economic justice need a major paradigm shift and recognize that foundation money, often the result of exploited wealth, is public money." (Incite!, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded) "Annanya Bhattacharjee has offered important insight on how political formations within the NPIC become defenders of the status quo. For example, in Bhattacharjee’s address during the 2004 conference The Revolution Will Not be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, she remarked on these __attributes of the NPIC: the non-profit structure is predicated on a corporate structure and hierarchy that rewards “bourgeois credentials” and “upward mobility”; the non-profit model makes it easier for young economically privileged people just coming out of college to start a non-profit than to engage in long-term established movements; the model is obsessed with institution building rather than organizing; and it forces social justice activists to become more accountable to funders than to our communities.__" (Incite!, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded)
November 18, 2025 at 3:44 PM
jofmat.bsky.social
Book 2: The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates

With unwavering intellectual honesty, Coates confronts some oppressive myths and connects the dots between literature, power, and politics.
"Oppressive power is preserved in the smoke and fog, and sometimes it is smuggled in the unexamined shadows of the language of the oppressed themselves." (Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message) "A literature fueled by a profound human experience must necessarily burn at a high flame, and thus a “material handicap” is transformed into a “spiritual advantage,” putting in the hands of the oppressed “the conditions of a classical art,” which is to say the power to haunt people, to move people, and expand the brackets of humanity. This is as true for those laboring under the shadow of enslavement as it is for those laboring under the shadow of apartheid." (Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message) "Politics is the art of the possible, but art creates the possible of politics." (Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message)
November 18, 2025 at 3:44 PM
jofmat.bsky.social
Book 1: Human Acts by Han Kang

Based on a event in Gwangju in South Korea, this book is a stunning literary reflection on violence and trauma and the threads that bind them together with humanity, its shells and echoes.
"It wasn’t as though we didn’t know how overwhelmingly the army outnumbered us. But the strange thing was, it didn’t matter. Ever since the uprising began, I’d felt something coursing through me, as overwhelming as any army. Conscience. Conscience, the most terrifying thing in the world." (Han Kang, Human Acts)
November 18, 2025 at 3:44 PM
jofmat.bsky.social
Given our times, self-help lit can be a false guardrail against an existential nihilism. But there is a role for individual and collective responsibility to free oneself and others.

Great piece by Erik Baker in the Drift magazine that connects some important dots.
While an exaggerated sense of our own importance is a recipe for both political and psychological disaster, it is also possible to overestimate our insignificance. Acceptance shades easily into excuse. With enough practice tolerating imperfection you can learn to forget what it is you're failing to live up to. When those expectations include owning a vacation home or winning a Nobel Prize, letting go might be healthy - but doing so is tragic when they include stopping a genocide or ending homelessness. If that seems like an unreasonable standard to hold ourselves to, it is only because so few of us today have experienced the way that participating in the exercise of collective power can augment and extend our personal agency. Erik Baker When we are left to fend for ourselves, the conditions that shape our lives tend to feel alien and monolithic, forcing us to choose between the two polarities of self-help: the delusional optimism of positive thinking and the stoic acceptance taught by "philosophy."
November 2, 2025 at 5:05 AM
jofmat.bsky.social
Cioran.

“Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and our memory.”

…and also of our knowledge (and ignorance).
"If we could understand and love the infinity of agonies which languish around us, all the lives which are hidden deaths, we should require as many hearts as there are suffering beings. And if we had a miraculously present memory which sustained the totality of our past pains, we should succumb beneath such a burden. Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and our memory." (E. M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay)
October 4, 2025 at 5:05 AM
jofmat.bsky.social
“…is it not the supreme and most insidious exercise of power to prevent people, to whatever degree, from having grievances by shaping their perceptions, cognitions and preferences in such a way…
In the first place, what, in any case, is a grievance - an articulated demand, based on political knowledge, an undirected complaint arising out of everyday experience, a vague feeling of unease or sense of deprivation? Second, and more important, is it not the supreme and most insidious exercise of power to prevent people, to whatever degree, from having grievances by shaping their perceptions, cognitions and preferences in such a way that they accept their role in the existing order of things, either because they can see or imagine no alternative to it, or because they see it as natural and unchangeable, or because they value it as divinely ordained and beneficial? - Power: A Radical View, by Steven Lukes
July 9, 2025 at 3:38 PM
jofmat.bsky.social
Reminded me of this excellent book. Highly recommended.
Book cover of ‘Shut Down the Business School’ by Martin Parker.
May 19, 2025 at 12:19 PM
jofmat.bsky.social
Just finished fellow Malayali Ullekh NP’s travelogue on Cuba. A joyous read, and some great references for further reading.
Cover of Ullekh NP’s book ‘Mad About Cuba’.
May 12, 2025 at 1:42 PM
jofmat.bsky.social
Usually feels like this, but especially true this week.
Dog with tie using laptop while the world is being destroyed
May 9, 2025 at 5:07 AM
jofmat.bsky.social
Happy #WorldBookDay.
"Turn a page, walk the lines of sentences: the singer steps out, and conjures a world of color and noise in the space inside your head." (Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land)
April 23, 2025 at 5:07 PM
jofmat.bsky.social
#EarthDay
"And in time we come to see that not only are we on the sidelines of the universe but that it’s of a universe of sidelines, that there is no centre, just a giddy mass of waltzing things, and that perhaps the entirety of our understanding consists of an elaborate and ever-evolving knowledge of our own extraneousness, a bashing away of mankind’s ego by the instruments of scientific enquiry until it is, that ego, a shattered edifice that lets light through." (Samantha Harvey, Orbital)
April 22, 2025 at 12:11 PM
jofmat.bsky.social
"The monarchs that fly south will not make it back north. Each departure, then, is final. Only their children return; only the future revisits the past. What is a country but a borderless sentence, a life?"

- Ocean Vuong, 'On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous'
"Migration can be triggered by the angle of sunlight, indicating a change in season, temperature, plant life, and food supply. Female monarchs lay eggs along the route. Every history has more than one thread, each thread a story of division. The journey takes four thousand eight hundred and thirty miles, more than the length of this country. The monarchs that fly south will not make it back north. Each departure, then, is final. Only their children return; only the future revisits the past. What is a country but a borderless sentence, a life?" (Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous)
April 22, 2025 at 11:57 AM
jofmat.bsky.social
Well, this is encouraging. We have something in common.
INTERVIEWER Why do you write? VARGAS LLOSA I write because I'm unhappy. I write because it's a way of fighting unhappiness.
April 16, 2025 at 10:41 AM
jofmat.bsky.social
"Stability is wanted, but not at the cost of change when change is imperative. The second thing nobody wants is mere adjustment. Adjustment is wanted, but not at the sacrifice of social justice."
"One thing nobody wants is a static relationship, something that is unalterable, something that is fixed for all times. Stability is wanted, but not at the cost of change when change is imperative. The second thing nobody wants is mere adjustment. Adjustment is wanted, but not at the sacrifice of social justice." (B.R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste)
April 14, 2025 at 2:35 PM
jofmat.bsky.social
"…the idea of law is associated with the idea of change, and when people come to know that what is called religion is really law, old and archaic, they will be ready for a change, for people know and accept that law can be changed."
"So long as people look upon it as religion they will not be ready for a change, because the idea of religion is generally speaking not associated with the idea of change. But the idea of law is associated with the idea of change, and when people come to know that what is called religion is really law, old and archaic, they will be ready for a change, for people know and accept that law can be changed." (B.R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste)
April 14, 2025 at 2:35 PM
jofmat.bsky.social
"How are you going to break up caste, if people are not free to consider whether it accords with reason? How are you going to break up caste, if people are not free to consider whether it accords with morality?"
"Reason and morality are the two most powerful weapons in the armoury of a reformer. To deprive him of the use of these weapons is to disable him for action. __How are you going to break up caste, if people are not free to consider whether it accords with reason? How are you going to break up caste, if people are not free to consider whether it accords with morality?__" (B.R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste)
April 14, 2025 at 2:35 PM
jofmat.bsky.social
"Political tyranny is nothing compared to social tyranny, and a reformer who defies society is a much more courageous man than a politician who defies the government."
"Political tyranny is nothing compared to social tyranny, and a reformer who defies society is a much more courageous man than a politician who defies the government." (B.R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste)
April 14, 2025 at 2:35 PM
jofmat.bsky.social
"For slavery does not merely mean a legalised form of subjection. It means a state of society in which some men are forced to accept from others the purposes which control their conduct."
"For slavery does not merely mean a legalised form of subjection. It means a state of society in which __some men are forced to accept from others the purposes which control their conduct.__" (B.R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste)
April 14, 2025 at 2:35 PM
jofmat.bsky.social
"The assertion by the individual of his own opinions and beliefs, his own independence and interest—over and against group standards, group authority, and group interests—is the beginning of all reform."
April 14, 2025 at 2:35 PM
jofmat.bsky.social
"…so many persons have callings which make no appeal to those who are engaged in them. Such callings constantly provoke one to aversion, ill will and the desire to evade."
"Considerations of social efficiency would compel us to recognise that the greatest evil in the industrial system is not so much poverty and the suffering that it involves, as the fact that so many persons have callings which make no appeal to those who are engaged in them. Such callings constantly provoke one to aversion, ill will and the desire to evade." (B.R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste)
April 14, 2025 at 2:35 PM