Stand by Me: Song of a Farmer
That’s Life!!!
Poet, translator and essayist Alok Bhalla does a variation on Surjit Patar’s Panjabi Poem. …[Read More]…
Month: January 2021
The Expansive Present as a Book of Infinite Chapters
Bookshelf
Awakening from the illusions of imaginary utopias promised by ‘historical Time’ Ashoak Upadhyay avers can help us discover the book of an expansive Present with no beginning or end.
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FROM A ‘COMMUNITY OF BEINGS’ TO ‘THE ECONOMY OF VIOLENCE’ AND…BACK?
That’s Life!!!
(First published June 20 2018)
India’s rich heritage of conservation visualized the world as a “Community of Beings” involving humans and other beneficent elements–hills and rivers, woods and trees, flora and fauna–according such beings respect, even veneration says Madhav Gadgil. Then colonialism and free India’s ‘Economy of Violence’ broke its back. But the healing is on. …[Read More]…
Autopsychography of Mohandas
Between the Lines
(First published March 10 2020)
In this shape-shifting prose-poem of imagined conversations with Gandhi’s heteronyms, Ashwani Kumar riffs on Ashis Nandy’s essay on the four ‘Gandhis’ after Gandhi to meditate on life in this darkling plain…[Read More]…
Ahimsa in the City of the Mind: Language, Identity-Politics and Partitions
Between the Lines
Those who arrange languages into structures of hierarchy obscure the distinction between words and daggers, making us, rues Alok Bhalla, “hard-bristled, sharp-fanged, knife-clawed creatures with merciless fires in our eyes.” …[Read More]…
Ethnic Homelands, Democracies as Incompatible Partners? Think Again!
Between the Lines
Popular understanding has it that ethnic exclusion is incompatible with democracy. Kanchan Chandra argues it isn’t. Silences built into our understanding of democracy legitimize such exclusion through manipulation of citizenship laws.…[Read More]…
Constricted Present, Imaginary Futures: The Tyranny of Illusions
That’s Life!!!
The idea of ‘vikas’ excludes wide swathes of people, their memories and shared experiences; it attempts to erase multiple Presents and peddles illusory Futures says Ashoak Upadhyay
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Battle-slip Poten-kin: Jallikkettu as an (Un)Easy ‘Pleisure’.
Visual Spaces
Cheri Jacob K. finds that despite its inability to move beyond the logic and the cliché of the filmic/popular dominant, somewhere, right at the very end, one comes face to face with a stillness that whispers the film’s essence “Life is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” …[Read More]…
Dubious Legacies: Cultural Histories and Pandemics
Bookshelf
Writing in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Vinay Lal takes us into the interstices of this pandemic and its forebears. Ashoak Upadhyay reviews the work
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In the Permanent Way: The (Once) Great Indian Railways
Bookshelf
Arup Chatterjee’s homage to the Indian Railways recalls those epiphanies that opened up for Darius Cooper . all over again, his own private operatic love affair with the “black beauties.” …[Read More]…