That’s Life!!!
: Israel and the cheerleaders of its bombing in Gaza ought to realize the unpopular discomforting truth that Islam not only saved western Jewry from extinction but provided it with a new context to flourish in and Jews to enjoy all-round prosperity. Based on David Wasserstein lecture on the subject. …[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
Self-proclaimed professor in English language skills at a couching college in Kota and editor of its political journal. U.R Sane writes to his fellow-traveller in Atlanta laying out likely outcomes of manufactured realities and recent events. A fiction that tells a looking-glass truth…[Read More]…
by H Masud Taj
That’s Life!!!
On World Children’s Day (November 20th) Calligrapher-Poet H Masud Taj dedicates three calligraphic quotes to the children dying in Gaza…[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
Bharat Dogra offers up little known historical record of tribal resistance to colonial exploitation under the leadership of Govind Guru—still revered through oral traditions in the Bhil areas. Photographs from the Mangarh Memorial by P.L. Patel* P.L. Patel* …[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
Vidya Vanam is a school in a village called Anaikatti, at the foothills of the Nilgiris, about 30 kilometres from Coimbatore on the border of Kerala. Part of the village is on the Tamil Nadu side and the other on the Kerala side. …[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
Despite doubts raised by the Apex Court, the Centre wants to push ahead with GM Mustard farming. On the ground, some villages in Madhya Pradesh show how natural farming is the answer for sustainable farming points out Bharat Dogra…[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
A vital Atlantic Ocean system could collapse by 2060, eventually spelling catastrophe for the people who live in countries that border the Atlantic Ocean, warns Siri Chilukuri. …[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
Once again the Uniform Civil Code has surfaced with Prime Minister Narendra Modi opening that Pandora’s Box as a as a electioneering talking point that does not create consensus through debate on its intricacies and complexities. Compare that with Nehru’s vision on the Hindu Code Bills from the late 1940s on meant to explain the grounds for reform and take the Opposition along. Debate as praxis …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Welcome to the new India, a mirror of image of our colonial past with its crippling inequalities, authoritarian rule and a smug elite feasting off both.Avay Shukla with his stinging wit and critical gaze on the new India that is Bharat. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
The film exposes the tell-tale symptoms of a nation in the grip of a post-truth reality …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
What are the means to knowledge? How do we know that what we know is free from error? What is the nature of error in knowing? What is truth and what are its criteria? These questions relate in the first place to the knowing of the self and the knowing of the other in their mutual relationship; questions not just for philosophers alone but for rdinary people, Chaturvedi Badrinath averred. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
In Rajasthan’s Anandpuri block, Bhil (tribal) communities are redefining their lives by moving away from labour-migration back to their roots in sustainable, biodiverse-rich farming to meet their livelihoods, finds Bharat Dogra. Photographs by P.l. Patel …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
The exposures of financial malfeasance are by the Adani group a reflection of the neo-liberal policies that have been followed by the Indian state for decades, says C. P. Chandrasekhar
…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
On the fiftieth anniversary of the historic Chipko Movement that caught popular imagination and became almost a household name in India Bharat Dogra who was closely associated with it does a recap of its strategic role in asserting peoples’ rights through satyagraha and its overall takeaways we need to remember as we ponder the devastation in the eco-sensitive Himalayan regions.…[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
As India races towards oligopolistic capitalism, workers are being stripped of even those path-breaking benefits legislated upon years ago says Bharat Dogra in two accompanying meditations…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
The tragic suicides of three teenage candidates studying at coaching classes in Kota point to what is ugly in our education system for sure. But more than that it indicts a development discourse that homogenises learning to turn young minds into bots, says Ashoak Upadhyay…[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
At the Mumbai Press Club’s annual RedInk Awards 2022 this month, Justice B. N. Srikrishna laid out his warning of the dangers to democracy when the fourth estate falters or is endangered. …[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
Bolivia’s President Luis Arce used his platform at the United Nations recently to propose an alternative, 14-point program to what he called “a wide-ranging, systemic capitalist crisis that increasingly endangers the life of humanity and the planet” Ben Norton of Multipolarista breaks it down for us. …[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
In an age of the atomized individual, where learning is stripped of moral values and respect for differences, the encounters between the atheist Gora and Gandhi the believer, provides a shining example of the power of listening to the ‘other.’…[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
IIn this age of power politics that breeds delusions and falsehoods we dance to the roiling chants of communal hatreds and war, stripped of all humanity, Mohandas K.Gandhi, appears with a lantern. Do we see him asks Ashoak Upadhyay. …[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
Set aside the maps of misreadings into India’s grand role on the world stage and look inwards at its abyssal lines with Subodh Varma who offers two contrasting scenarios: booming corporate profits and zooming economic distress…[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
In one of the world’s wealthiest nations, below the headlines of rising inflation and the impact this may have on electoral politics, is the problem of rising poverty among Americans that needs urgent attention. Sonali Kolhatkar reveals the depths of that poverty and sluggish policy responses.…[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
The strike is the sharpest tool labor has to fight for its collective interests, and American workers are beginning to organize in their workplaces with an energy not seen in decades notes Kshama Sawant.…[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
Radio communications made their appearance in India in 1929 with the British – controlled Indian Broadcasting Company, and with emergence of regional centres such as the Calcutta Radio Station. Against this backdrop Nandini Bhattacharya examines the importance of Manimala, the epistolary novelette by Leela Mazumdar in a dialogic format produced by the structure of letters to the radio hosts seeking advice, guidance companionship …[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
Riyaz Latif ruminates on ruins in which the very incompleteness of those architectural fragments, a broken arch, stones released from their regimental composition evokes an entropic materiality reposing in the arms of earth and grass, nourishing itself on its own organic unraveling. …[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
Jamaican writer Marlon James speaks with Shalini Puri at the Tata Literature Live! The Mumbai International Lit fest November 21 2021 on the dynamism and range of Caribbean and other postcolonial Englishes, the search that led to James’ current trilogy, the importance of myth, debates about cultural appropriation, and Marlon’s advice to writers. …[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
South Asian SF Dialogues series, curated by Tarun K. Saint for The Beacon features Soham Guha, bilingual speculative fiction writer and critic from Kolkata, on the genre’s rich SF tradition in Bengali and his own odyssey …[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
South Asian SF Dialogues series, curated by Tarun K. Saint for The Beacon continues with Tashan Mehta, who holds that SF/fantasy help explore the realities of disenfranchised groups. Her debut novel, The Liar’s Weave, was shortlisted for the Prabha Khaitan Woman’s Voice Award. Alok Bhalla joins in.…[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
This session features Sami Ahmad Khan, writer and SF critic/scholar from Delhi, India who teaches a course on this genre in conversation with Tarun K.Saint who curates this series for The Beacon. …[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
Manjula Padmanabhan, playwright, comic strip artist, writer and columnist based in Delhi, India and the USA also writes literary and SF/speculative fiction converses with Tarun K. Saint who curates this series for The Beacon. …[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
Prakash is a schoolboy whose odyssey towards a self-awareness and grounded education ought to be a lesson for us all on meaningful learning. A short fiction by Lakshmi Kannan…[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
South Asian SF Dialogues series, curated by Tarun K. Saint for The Beacon is back with the next instalment of conversations, this one with Navin Weeraratne from Sri Lanka, who writes speculative fiction and military SF with a dose of hard science. Followed by a sampling of his fiction.…[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
South Asian SF Dialogues series, curated by Tarun K. Saint for The Beacon has Vandana Singh, physicist and writer of speculative fiction engaged in a conversation on the importance of speculative fiction in re-imagining our world with alternative futures…[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
Curated by Tarun K. Saint for The Beacon, South Asian SF Dialogues engage with Saad Z. Hossain, fantasy, weird fiction, and SF/speculative fiction writer from Bangladesh. Followed by ‘The Endless’ his short fiction…[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
Curated by Tarun K. Saint for The Beacon, South Asian SF Dialogues series continues conversations about SF this time with Kehkashan Khalid.…[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
The archetypes in the Gond Ramayani are borrowed from the repertoire of Gond narratives, rituals, belief systems and socio-cultural moorings, It is not just a “Ramayan in inverse.” argues Molly Kaushal.…[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
Curated by Tarun K. Saint for The Beacon, South Asian SF Dialogues initiates conversations about SF from the subcontinent, with the authors who have helped shape the genre in recent times Here’s Bina Shah …[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
Curated by Tarun K. Saint for The Beacon, South Asian SF Dialogues series continues conversations about SF from the subcontinent, with authors who have helped shape the genre such as Anil Menon
…[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
Curated by Tarun K. Saint for The Beacon, South Asian SF Dialogues series continues conversations about SF this time with M.G.Vassanji. Followed by an extract from his novel, “Nostalgia”
…[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
Image’ managers weave veils over the brutal incompetence of pandemic governance; but illusions and the Image-as-Spectacle are constantly manufactured to obscure ‘abyssal’ lines in our society, says Ashoak Upadhyay …[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
Vinay Lal introduces the reader to Beethoven’s little-known familiarity with texts like the Bhagavad Gita and “Indian ideas of the sensorium” that helped the composer create what he calls “the music of advaita” …[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
Poet, translator and essayist Alok Bhalla does a variation on Surjit Patar’s Panjabi Poem. …[Read More]…
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]…
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
…[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
Sarosh Bana on the year that was and the images that should haunt every Indian with pain and anger, but may not as willful indifference sets in …[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
The ‘Farm Laws’ are being contested as unjust because they transfer adjudicatory power from civil courts to state authorities. MAHALAKSHMI PAVANI examines these provisions as violations of the principle of separation of powers.…[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
The ongoing farmers’ agitation and the farm laws prompting them need to be located within the larger crisis fracturing rural India. The NRAS report offers an analysis that does this. Excerpts.…[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]…