Personal Notes

Rihard Eskow visits Bethlehem, birthplace of Jesus in the West Bank, now a ghost town after Israeli bombing and discovers a tragically moving nativity space amidst the rubble. …[Read More]…

In this riveting talk, Chaturvedi Badrinath casts light on the symbiotically spiritual relationship Swami Vivekananda had with some of his American women-followers and femininity in general. They were not ‘instruments for use:’ he never used any human being for his own ends or for his work’. …[Read More]…

At the Juma prayers, the khutba elaborated on a saying of the Prophet that the roof that covers the five pillars of Islam (kalma, prayers, zakat, fasting, hajj) is the tongue of the believer, i.e. care must be taken while addressing others. H. Masud Taj ponders over this…[Read More]…

A deeply moving memoir of his parent’s tangled roller-coaster relationship and its impact on children coping with them by Ratnakar Tripathy …[Read More]…

What does it feel to realize you have become the ‘Other’, separated by grafted-on identities from the community of fellow humans? Romana Shaikh unpacks the trauma of that ‘Otherness’ and searches for that space of connectedness, where silence does not hurt, stillness is beautiful.…[Read More]…

H. Masud Taj takes a leaf out of The Matrix and swallows the red pill to delve into the unsettling truth about Partition and the unlearnt truth about Hindu-Muslim unity, embodied in the life and work of Maulana Azad.…[Read More]…

On August 1, Mayank Bhatt, Toronto-based writer of fiction and essays died after a protracted battle with pancreatic cancer and other ailments. He was a little over 60 years old. A tribute to an indomitable spirit by Ashoak Upadhyay/The Beacon…[Read More]…

Malavika Kapur ponders the pandemic’s effects not just on human but all life and she finds not just suffering but the gifts of generosity and the will to live.…[Read More]…

The 25-year period in which Beat developed and flourished in the United States and then spread around the globe—roughly the end of World War II to the beginning of the seventies—is complex, but for women, in particular, this quarter century marks major struggles for equality. Nancy M. Grace traces the contours of women Beat poets’ and artists’ journeys. Curated by Jennie Skerl…[Read More]…

When Edward Said visited India in 1997 to deliver the Rajiv Gandhi Memorial Lecture and receive honorary doctorates from JNU and Jamia Millia Islamia, H. Masud Taj, oral poet and calligrapher sought to meet the author of the foundational ‘Orientalism’ to recite his poem ‘Dragonfly.’ And did. …[Read More]…

Mayank Bhatt explores coping with emotional desolation and economic destitution, the causes of pain, and sadness in this last essay in the series of his journey as a cancer patient that began mid-2020…[Read More]…

How to turn the usually sticky, bubble-gum-like mind into the solidity of objective space, true in its opacity, or into the fineness of ether with its true openness? So that thoughts, doubts, fear do not haunt and inhabit it? Bibhu Padhi searches for this state of grace.…[Read More]…

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]…

Geetanjali Shree, Hindi novelist and essayist, remembers Intizar Husain whose death anniversary falls on February 2nd as an affectionate friend with a disposition that helped him cross cultural boundaries in dialogic immersions. ..[Read More]…

Mayank Bhatt faces his first bad scan results after eighteen months of chemotherapy kept a fragile status quo. Navigating sombre thoughts about his treatment, he continues to explore love and relationships, friendship and forgetting, dates and deadlines...[Read More]…

Paul Zacharia’s ribald remembrance of college in Mysore where he arrives from his small village in Kerala armed with a ‘sin-agenda’ and injected with the ‘alien seed’ of literature that would inch him closer to his literary vocation ..[Read More]…

The existential core of concerns about the pandemic, Ratnakar Tripathy believes, is that it yokes and synchronizes two contrasting anxieties that have hit us in unison: having to imagine a world without us while visualizing ourselves dangling in a vacuum...[Read More]…

On October 09 2017, V.C. Harris, polymath literary critic. translator social activist and teacher-mentor met with a fatal accident. His students, poets A.J. Thomas, S. Jospeh and translator-critic Cheri Jacob K. pay tributes. ..[Read More]…

Steering clear of postcolonial sensibilities, Indo-Guyanese poet and writer Cyril Dabydeen ‘reads’ V.S.Naipaul as a writer seeking that free state of an indwelling life committed to art while “pushing the boundaries of fiction and autobiography” towards the “heart of his organic nature”...[Read More]…

Darius Cooper drives with son from Los Angeles to John Steinbeck country with a stop-over at Henry Miller’s Big Sur log cabin and discovers a little more about himself...[Read More]…

Bilingual writer Paul Zacharia travels back in time to his childhood in a remote village in Kerala and to the birthing of his ‘invisible vocation’, reading and writing in a farmer’s household...[Read More]…

Playwright Atamjit on how he came by Makhan Singh the leftist, non-violent freedom fighter who negotiated between his cultural roots in India and belongingness to a distant Kenya and how the Indo-kenyan became the inspiration for the play The Red Prophet...[Read More]…

A year after he learnt of his fatal illness, its traumatic coping and chemotherapy, Mayank Bhatt dwells further on his struggle to find meaning to life and death, in love and writing...[Read More]…

Sukrita Paul Kumar remembers her childhood in Africa through two short verses...[Read More]…

Neera Kapur-Dromson on ‘our Mama Mboga’ who delivered vegetables and fresh fruit to the house for thirty years in Livington Kenya. ..[Read More]…

In these two vignettes of their remembrances of pre-Independant Kenya, Kishore Saint and then Prem Saint offer glimpses of working as teachers in a multiracial society ruled by a coloniser-mindset.
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Darius Cooper responds to Geetanjali Shree’s “Growing up in Two Tongues” with delightful vignettes of multilingual possibilities and offers a clue as to why “English…determinedly adopted me.”..[Read More]…

“No friend can come to your side and one cannot, in good conscience hold that expectation of anyone.” In this desolate aloneness Anannya Dasgupta turns to haiku and the “aesthetic loneliness of sabi...[Read More]…

In an intense examination of a writing life, Punjabi writer Ajeet Cour on what drives her: among others, an attempt “ to reconstruct life and interpret it in terms…more persuasive than reality.”…[Read More]…

Hindi fiction writer Geetanjali Shree on growing up in two languages invested with an objectionable colonial hierarchy, finding the ‘Centre’, her centre in the ‘Other’ that turns her vocation ‘visible’...[Read More]…

Indira Goswami’s life and work interrogate facets of women’s empowerment in India, foremost among them attitudes to the girl-child, marriage, widowhood, mapping a continuum of social change says Malashri Lal.…[Read More]…

Novelist Geetanjali Shree ruminates on man’s hubris and her own anguish as its ‘collateral beneficiary’. …[Read More]…

Critiquing mainstream education as the legacy of the dismissal of colonized people as incapable of culture and epistemic pursuits, Sayan Dey casts around for alternatives he calls Pedagogy of the Stupid. …[Read More]…

Ismat Chugtai recounts her run-in with the law and the obscenity trial in a Lahore court alongside Manto, with playful courage, conviction and trepidation at what she had wrought …[Read More]…

Born into a Mahar Dalit family, Kumud Pawde finds her vocation as a Sanskrit scholar and writer in the intersectional byways of gender, caste and their subaltern ambiguities.…[Read More]…

As a “young educated tribal woman,” Disha Wadekar finds ‘Womanism’ a more inclusive concept than Feminism for the women of diverse marginalized sections of Indian society …[Read More]…

Of this exquisite meditation by Krishna Sobti on her mother, translator-poet Alok Bhalla says it is revelatory of her own personal integrity and of the stoicism she admired in her women characters. …[Read More]…

Mayank Bhatt discovers he has pancreatic cancer and confronts questions of life and living, death and dying, the pain and hope of treatment and what it means to be an atheist…[Read More]…

Shamsur Rehman Faruqi doyen of Urdu literary tradition and champion of an Indic aesthetic passes on.…[Read More]…

Amidst recurrent communal riots and Hindu-Muslim tensions in colonial Bengal, Tagore and Begum Rokeya, with vastly different backgrounds, religious identities, upbringing and creative sensibilities, stepped out of their cultural and gendered borders to embrace the ‘other’ says Mohammad A. Quayum …[Read More]…

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]…

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]…

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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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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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]…