That’s Life!!!
Students in India grapple with the challenge of online learning, In Kashmir? Evita Rodrigues looks at the plight of students struggling to learn under lockdowns and clamp downs much before the pandemic. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
In a response that is equally intense and provocative, Asif Raza reads Riyaz Latif’s essay on the red-breasted rosy starlings as a prose poem, offering up a text that stands weightily on its own acuity of vision.…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Vidhya Sreenivasan translates from Tamil two stories by Dilip Kumar about life in a temple town, With light brush strokes Dilip Kumar sketches a layered portrait of the routine of ritual and its web of relationships stirred by the unexpected. Here’s the first one.…[Read More]…
Personal Notes
A real meeting with a microbiologist in a Brighton coffee shop offers poet Ashwani Kumar an occasion to fantasize a dense and complex reality…[Read More]…
Between the Lines
If wretchedness has scarred their lives and hasten their death, it’s only the poor who are to be blamed. That’s what we in our hall of mirrors have been led to believe, says Ashoak Upadhyay in this second of a four part series. …[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
A short fiction that reads like a perennial reality for an oppressed minority this tale by Asghar Wajahat portrays the psychological damage that even talk of violence can have on the vulnerable. …[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
Music from marginalized peoples who are at the center of growing consciousness of other Presents, alternatives to a narrow mainstream present.…[Read More]…
Between the Lines
In this first of a four part series on the lives we lead, Ashoak Upadhyay untangles the web of illusion obscuring the pivot on which mainstream media turns: a neo-liberal nationalist-statist iniquitous order. …[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
India’s rating on Press Freedoms measured by an index for 182 countries has slipped over the last year and stands way low. The world’s largest democracy must accept the RSF report and improve its ranking, says Raoof Mir. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
A dreamscape etched by Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, in which time collapses, characters merge and separate, narrative moves between memoir and fiction, the ghost of Mir comes alive in encounters defined by dialogic imagination. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Scholar-author Geeta Patel comes to Chennai is locked down with poet-friends and finds herself in lyric. And why not? Reading, translating Miraji’s “queer hauntings,” her hidden ‘vocation had to surface.…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
As she rides a cab in Mumbai and the driver steers her through an unfamiliar city’s sights, sharing stories and histories, poetry and silences Vidya Rao experiences the warmth of memories, kindness, kinship…[Read More]…
Bookshelf
The pandemic reveals the intimacies between vaccine lobbies and the media that create, says Padmaja Challakere, both fear and valorized medicine. In Camus’ work she finds links between an agreement to fear and passive compliance to authority. And what it takes to be human.…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Urdu polymath Shamsur Rahman Faruqi deconstructs our inherited ideas on culture, nation and history; points to a rich tradition of Indian or Indo-Muslim identity evolving against a colonial ethos. And it is still intact. …[Read More]…
Personal Notes
Nihilism and barbarity are inside our door; belief has replaced truth, truth is illusion and war an eternal condition. In this deafening darkness Dilip Simeon finds rays of light in Gandhi’s steadfast adherence to Truth and love—for all life. …[Read More]…
Between the Lines
The pandemic is telling us that globalization and its transmission of injustices and exploitation of the weak and Nature’s bounty have screwed our earthly home. Band-aids won’t work. Ashish Kothari on what could.…[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
While a 0.125 micron organism has brought the World to its knees and mankind is in a race to find a vaccine to contain the COVID19 virus Girijaa Upadhyay reflects on the mutating nexus between Man and Nature …[Read More]…
Personal Notes
The coronavirus has swept away a generation of wisdom-keepers, WWII survivors, storytellers, parents, and grandparents in Bergamo, Italy. An anthropologist mourns with her community—the hardest hit in the country—and asks all of us the most difficult questions of this pandemic.…[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
In this critical review of Satyajit Ray’s first children film made fifty years ago, Darius Cooper visits his oeuvre to offer insights into the legend’s take on music, masculinity and inter-personal relations in his films…[Read More]…
Between the Lines
For writer Annie Zaidi the “lockdown felt like a physical enactment of my inner world—a sense of siege, of caution and confusion. ”Then she hears of the migrants fleeing; of Muslims demonized She feels the need to bear witness to the fires of a hate campaign that the pandemic will fuel. …[Read More]…
Personal Notes
Two poets discuss life and letters creating an aura of magic with words in conversations without maps. Time stands still as Shamsur Rahman Faruqi and Asif Raza engage with each other creating a dialogic musicality. …[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
In a pioneering study, Jan Sahas did a rapid assessment report through a telephonic survey with 3,196 migrant workers that portrays abysmal conditions of life, extreme vulnerabilities in the pandemic; conditions that call out our moral irresponsibility, official indifference towards a vast majority of the working poor.…[Read More]…
Between the Lines
A wide spectrum of opinion admits the coronavirus pandemic is exposing inequality and poverty in stark terms. But its management (or lack of it) will do more says Ashoak Upadhyay.…[Read More]…
Bookshelf
Three texts whose readings may shed some light on questions rarely pondered as victims of a gross, violent materialism. Readings for the perplexed seething isolation forced on us by a microbe.…[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
Combating the pandemic requires immediate responses in terms of universal health and treatment facilities and strategies to reduce the possibilities of recurrence. Vikalp Sangam offers a view. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
At the window, the eye is fated to register much more than the red-breasted rosy starlings Riyaz Latif waits for. Your vision of linearity sweeps over panoramas of disenchantment. Then the birds arrive, sketching the skies in unison …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Geetha Sukumaran, poet and translator blurs boundaries in her poems to negotiate multiple identities; diasporic Indo-Canadian, career woman and diverse inheritances of Western and a glorious Tamil women-poets’ tradition. …[Read More]…
Personal Notes
Fifty years after Gandhi’s death, Ashis Nandy identified four personae of Mohandas Gandhi that survived; perhaps there are more in this haunted, frightened republic. But those four are worth recalling.…[Read More]…
Between the Lines
Two months and counting, the most historic non-violent resistance to laws against Indian pluralism, against humanity, continues to flower and blossom in the face of unprecedented terror and violence of the nation-state..…[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
The momentous anti-CAA protests offer fresh evidence that India is defined by diverse expressions of solidarity coalescing into both a unity of shared suffering and a celebration of that diversity says Ashoak Upadhyay.…[Read More]…
Between the Lines
Surveillance today is no longer about being watched by the Orwellian Big Brother but about being recorded. Nothing vanishes: that’s the terror of data surveillance today. Padmaja Challakere reviews two seminal books that outline a dystopic present. .…[Read More]…
Personal Notes
Sequestered within binary logics divinity straightens gender and sacralizes “the heterosexual matrix.” With lila as a lens, we might glimpse ways divinity can unlock possibilities of gendered and sexual being and doing says Lucinda Ramberg.…[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
Protests against citizenship legislations are historic, defining moments for India and the world; they have created political space for a humanism long considered irrelevant, says Ashoak Upadhyay.…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Sri Lanka’s civil war extracted a heavy toll on ordinary people. The poetic visions of P. Ahilan intersect individual grief of ruptured relationships and the collective trauma of war while engaging with personal and political realms. Geetha Sukumaran his translator opens the door to his work. …[Read More]…
Personal Notes
Recent mob attacks on teachers and students signal the destruction of campus culture and the dismantling of public education, says Roshni Sengupta an academic and alumna of JNU.…[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
In this stunning history-in-the-making representation, Evita Rodrigues crowd sources visuals of women asserting a humanism India is being bulldozed into renouncing.…[Read More]…
Personal Notes
She wasn’t just a pioneer of handicrafts but of women’s rights in India, an activist of the anti-colonial struggles and a visionary of the ‘Global South’ as a dialogic third space in world politics unmediated by the West, says Vinay Lal.…[Read More]…
Bookshelf
Two texts, two visions of the evolving self and poetic futures. Murali Sivaramakrishnan looks for parallels and differences in the radical gaze of a mystic and a Marxist.…[Read More]…
Between the Lines
In the winter of 2019 the nation witnessed a spring of protest against the abuse of power for communal ends in the form of the CAA. Gandhi must be smiling up there, thinks Sakuntala.…[Read More]…
Bookshelf
An invaluable eye witness indictment of police brutality on students and faculty at the Aligarh Muslim University in December by a team of civil society members.…[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
What has progress wrought? Destruction of madre terra. What has unbridled power sought? Decimation of insaniyat. And yet, in this “grisly morning after…” glimpses of the future we desire.…[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
The narratives about the Indian economy have flattened out to a plot about a number, a statistic, a means that has become an end erasing the people that count, or should, says Ashoak Upadhyay.…[Read More]…
Between the Lines
The SC ruling is in its spirit contradictory and even disturbing in fundamental ways. But is it a victory for Hindus? Vinay Lal thinks not because it endorses a growing intolerance not merely, against Muslims and Dalits but also towards adherents of other practices and conceptions of Hinduism.…[Read More]…
Personal Notes
Suketu Mehta author of ‘This Land is Our Land…” talks with Mayank Bhatt and Gavin Barrett in Toronto about immigrants and their place in a turbulent world.…[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
In a world of over-representation, is it possible to experience reality without the intermediation of our conditioned existence? Murali Sivaramakrishnan thinks so; his visual expressions he contends, “are coloured by my experience of earth and by my inner feelings.” …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
In a tribute to Miraji on his 70th death anniversary Geeta Patel reflects on his poetic queerness and its gift to readers of the ecstasies of incomplete meanings.…[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
Both Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, authors of novels about dystopic futures penned thoughts on Gandhi that reflect their own visions of possible freedoms from the worlds they had created. …[Read More]…
Between the Lines
The subject of Gandhi’s “religion” has never been more important than at present when Hindu nationalism is sharply ascendant and Hindu pride is being championed as a necessary form of the reawakening of a long subjugated people says Vinay Lal.…[Read More]…
Bookshelf
In this age of power politics that breeds delusions and falsehoods we dance to the roiling chants of communal violence, stripped of all humanity. Mahatma Gandhi,appears with a lantern,the last man standing in this bleeding darkness says Ashoak Upadhyay. …[Read More]…
Personal Notes
In a unique portrayal of his struggle to come to terms with Gandhi’s experiments in truth, Nirmal Kumar Bose introduces a new aesthetic of a multilayered memoir. Relevant with the release of Manuben’s diary. …[Read More]…