Between the Lines
Anwar Moazzam invokes a theoretical framework to address the duality expressed in Islam’s universal ethical values and the forms these values take in different cultural zones of the world.…[Read More]…
Between the Lines
In the history of humanity, the Buddha will likely stand out, as perhaps, the only thinker who found a non-religious solution for the human existential angst in ethical practices avers K.P. Shankaran…[Read More]…
Between the Lines
Almost two decades ago, Ruth Vanita looked around for a ‘Hindu left’ as a foil to the Hindu Right. She did not find it; its absence led to questions that are relevant even more so today and need to be discussed.…[Read More]…
Between the Lines
In response to the issues raised by Ruth Vanita about the absence of a Hindu left, Ashoak Upadhyay asks if the question should not be reframed: Whatever made the Left dismiss Hinduism as an impediment to modernity? …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Meena a dalit student who has realised her ambition to become a doctor in the face of bullying teachers is still afflicted with self-doubts.. By Dalpat Chauhan translated by Hemang Ashwinkumar…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Among the poets that Miraji (1912-1949) translated with his freewheeling style and rhythms was e.e. cummings. Geeta Patel translates the Urdu modernist’s reading and offers a glimpse into his poetic visions…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
To Vidhya Sreenivasan poetry is a choreographed expression of the collective of memory, wishes, questions-anything that is born out of the conversations we have with the world around us.”…[Read More]…
Personal Notes
Ashwin Desai offers up a slice of history of indentured Indians yearning to return to their home-South Africa, a century ago and riffs on what it means for their descendants in post-apartheid South Africa. …[Read More]…
Personal Notes
How to explain the spiritual homelessness of the rooted, of one who has never left his home? Nirmal Verma on the consequent ‘loss of self’ and the place of literature in describing it. Translated by Alok Bhalla.…[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
Music from around the world that celebrates difference in musical expressions and the poetry of humankind against hate. …[Read More]…
Between the Lines
Like it was for the ancient philosophers in India, China and Greece, philosophy for Gandhi was a way of life not just the construction of theories, says K.P. Shankaran …[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
The idea of a ‘new normal’ has been rife during the lockdown but one is puzzled about the newness of the normal. A question haunts us and Dev Nath Pathak asks it: what is normal about the so called new?…[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
The pandemic has not socially distanced us; social media had already started our self- isolation and it will do so even more in this age of the emoji says Ashoak Upadhyay in this fourth part of the Lives We Lead series.…[Read More]…
Bookshelf
An excerpt from her debut novel in which Bhaswati Ghosh chronicles how Partition’s victims, unwanted on either side of the border built their lives and shaped the socio-cultural landscape of Calcutta. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
At a station on board a superfast to Prayag, great but illusory expectations. Two poems by Hemang Ashwinkumar…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Poet translator and dramatist Mukhtar Siddiqui (1919-1972) shaped modern Urdu literature with innovative lyrical content evident in these poems translated by poet Riyaz Latif…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Poet and translator A.J. Thomas meditates on the delights of fish eating and wonders about sardines in Sardinia …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
The aura of victimhood and romance around Dara Shikoh’s last days and death has obscured his command of Vedanta, Sufism and Philosophy. He was besides, a serious Persian poet avers Shamsur Rahman Faruqi…[Read More]…
Between the Lines
Gandhi may have failed but does not the Gandhian idea of a threefold revolution for sanity against “dark and demonic” forces still count, asked A.K. Saran fifty years ago. His question is still relevant …[Read More]…
Between the Lines
Gandhi is the last representative of the sant traditions of India. Vinay Lal explores this proposition particularly with reference to his unequivocal admiration for the bhajan, “Vaishnavajana to” (“Call Only That One a Vaishnava”) …[Read More]…
Personal Notes
Violence is so routinized as to have become a banal spectacle denuding what’s left of our humanity. But there’s hope, feels Dilip Simeon in Gandhi’s message of Ahimsa as Truth.
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Literary Trails
His poetry interiorises suffering and outrage such that the public /private binary dissolves in his visions of abandoned love and injustices across space and time. Here’s Robin S. Ngangom
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Bookshelf
In this extract from his family saga, Saeed Ibrahim chronicles a tragedy foretold with brushstrokes that trace a life of routine grounded in communal harmony and tradition. …[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
In this concluding part of his journey through Hindi cinema’s Nehruvian tryst, Darius Cooper finds an era of vanishing illusions, nostalgia and incipient despair
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That’s Life!!!
Preoccupation with this blind metric’s fall as the barometer of well-being hides the reality of a deliberate pauperization that began much earlier and has gathered speed says Ashoak Upadhyay…[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
In this first part of his journey across Hindi cinema in post-Independent India till 1958, Darius Cooper sees Hindi films made with Nehru’s spirit of an “adaptable Occidentalism.” …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Asif Raza reviews Shamsur Rahman Faruqi’s novel ‘Kai Chaand Thay Sare Aasmaan` (The Mirror of Beauty) over ten months of immersive and reflective readings in this riveting dialogue with the author.…[Read More]…
Between the Lines
Lokmanya Tilak’s death centenary (August 01) and the end of the annual celebratory Ganesh Chaturthi procession he launched prompts Mayank Bhatt to re-visit that leader’s shifting stances and his role as ‘nationalist’ leader. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Poet, painter and literary critic Sukrita Paul Kumar draws on her experience of working with the homeless street children and natural-disaster victims to search for meaning in poetry and painting …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Poet A. J. Thomas turns his gaze to the city he didn’t want to love, did when he was away from it even though “It’s at once like an ocean that throws up/ Everything it takes in, and like a volcano/ That consumes anything thrown in” …[Read More]…
Personal Notes
Ashwin Desai sees the problems plaguing South African cricket–race, class privilege, ‘head counts’ and quotas—as symptoms of a deeper malaise, of racial chauvinism making a comeback.
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That’s Life!!!
In stark contrast to the ruthlessness of capitalism and states exploiting the pandemic for the accumulation of profit and power ordinary people especially the young are defining the borderless world of caring: two pages from an unfolding saga. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Gazing at the stars, Iraq War veteran,memoirist and poet Brian Turner ‘reads’ love, Time, silence and solitude in their fleeting fiery train of light. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
A short fiction by Shinjini Kumar of a chance encounter on a bus unfolds a tale of love with happy beginnings and ambiguous endings in evasive memories. …[Read More]…
Between the Lines
Stepping back from the drum beating of the Ram Mandir at Ayodhya as history-in-the-making (for better or worse), Aditya Sudarshan peers into the cracks between the dichotomies defining national discourse for an alternative reading.…[Read More]…
Between the Lines
With midnight’s broken toll clanging in our ears, time we revisited ‘national’ poet to get a handle on our stifling visions of nationhood. Mohammad A. Quayum digs into Tagore’s ambiguities and finds a clear message of love for humanity above all else. …[Read More]…
Bookshelf
Tagore’s Gharey, Bairey was written over a century ago but the issues that propel the narrative and define the characters remain as relevant today as back then. Pankaj Dutt scans some of them.…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
In his lyrical elucidation of the archangel Israfil’s death, Noon Meem Rashid issues an elegiac imperative—weep tears for the death of the bearer of all sounds, for the silence that relegates all into nothingness.…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Hungarian poet musician and writer Gábor Lanczkor dwells in verse on what it means to be between two cultures for an artist in these poetic vignettes about the life of painter Amrita Sher-Gil mirrored through different voices…[Read More]…
Between the Lines
More than a hundred defense services veterans issue a statement critiquing their greater deployment in policing domestic streets rather than in protecting the nation’s borders.…[Read More]…
Personal Notes
Gujarati poet Yagnesh Dave recalls meeting with the late Varis Alvi at his home and an epiphanous moment when his host puts him in mind of a Rembrandt figure.…[Read More]…
Bookshelf
A southern Sinhala polity keen to ease its collective conscience may embrace institutionally sanctioned silence says Harshana Rambukwella but Ahilan’s poetic visions seek remembrance.…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Born in Kerala, poet and translator A.J. Thomas evokes a bond with the heart of Bengal in this poetic memoir, fusing the personal and the physical, seeking amidst its squalor and hopelessness “a familiar wag of humanity’s tail”.…[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
In this vivid recall of game-fixing by South Africa cricketers in the mid-1990s and some of whom now oppose support for Black Lives Matter, Ashwin Desai glimpses the spirit of Nelson Mandela that both torments and offers hope of redemption.…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
For Asif Raza if a poetic speech is formulated in the dark recesses of a poet’s psyche attuned to its subterranean rumblings, then it registers on the page as “the tremors of his soul.” Seven Sisters and other poems are examples.…[Read More]…
Personal Notes
In his musings on lockdown in Durban, Ashwin Desai rues the “beautiful torment of books” that sparks remembrances of his father. In the second he runs into the wonderland of Nature’s intimacy and intricacy.…[Read More]…
Personal Notes
Two short poems by Girijaa Upadhyay that express poignant anguish about ageing’s deleterious effects on body and mind.…[Read More]…
Between the Lines
A true fiction of an Unknown Indian mortgaging his soul to his master’s words that turn him into an impassioned mimic man till he hears sub-terrain voices. Ashoak Upadhyay on the lives we lead. Third of the four-part series…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
In this second story Dilip Kumar uses light brush strokes to delve into the humanity dwelling beneath the routine of ritual in a temple town with its web of relationships in this translation by Vidhya Sreenivasan…[Read More]…
Personal Notes
In this second part of his meditation on violence and modernity, Dilip Simeon traces its roots and finds in Gandhi’s satyagraha an answer with a noble, Socratic tradition of piety and truth-telling.…[Read More]…