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 10: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad

Omar’s book is remarkable because for how it uses language as a mirror to reveal the duplicity of power. He points to the heart of business as usual that fuels life as usual.
"Beyond the high walls and barbed wire and checkpoints that pen this place, there is the empire. And the empire as well is cocooned inside its own fortress of language—a language through the prism of which buildings are never destroyed but rather spontaneously combust, in which blasts come and go like Chinooks over the mountain, and people are killed as though to be killed is the only natural and rightful ordering of their existence. As though living was the aberration." (Omar el Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This) "Once far enough removed, everyone will be properly aghast that any of this was allowed to happen. But for now, it’s just so much safer to look away, to keep one’s head down, periodically checking on the balance of polite society to see if it is not too troublesome yet to state what to the conscience was never unclear." (Omar el Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This)
November 23, 2025 at 7:48 AM
jofmat.bsky.social
Book 9: A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

A book with two narrators separated across generations. It is a meditation on time, attention, and interconnectedness.

(I loved Ozeki’s other book, ‘The Form of Being and Emptiness’)
"Then is the opposite of now. So saying now obliterates its meaning, turning it into exactly what it isn’t. It’s like the word is committing suicide or something. So then I’d start making it shorter . . . now, ow, oh, o . . . until it was just a bunch of little grunting sounds and not even a word at all. It was hopeless, like trying to hold a snowflake on your tongue or a soap bubble between your fingertips. Catching it destroys it, and I felt like I was disappearing, too." (Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being) "If Zen Master Dōgen had been a physicist, I think he might have liked quantum mechanics. He would have naturally grasped the all-inclusive nature of superposition and intuited the interconnectedness of entanglement. As a contemplative who was also a man of action, he would have been intrigued by the notion that attention might have the power to alter reality, while at the same time understanding that human consciousness is neither more nor less than the clouds and water, or the hundreds of grasses. He would have appreciated the unbounded nature of not knowing." (Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being)
November 23, 2025 at 7:48 AM
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
Link to the piece here:
www.thedriftmag.com/how-i-learne...
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Shitty Life
Self-Help Gets Philosophical
www.thedriftmag.com
November 2, 2025 at 5:05 AM