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]…
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]…
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]…
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]…
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]…
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]…
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]…
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]…
Personal Notes
Raga Malkauns’ aural trajectory becomes an arch, stringing mutually unknown planes into each other. Its sounds and the ghosts it evokes outline the singular ineffable unity of all things finds Riyaz Latif in this tribute.…[Read More]…
Personal Notes
Never before has India witnessed such an “Organization of Hatreds” targeting minorities and the questioning, disobedient mind. Writers across languages and genres appeal for change. …[Read More]…
Personal Notes
The letters exchanged between Gandhi and Nehru late 1945 reveal free India’s rejection of a radical utopian vision in favor of a practical modernity. Time we returned to that vision of another future.…[Read More]…
Personal Notes
Theologian and activist, Riffat Hassan recalls and reflects on her involvement with inter-faith dialogue and its pitfalls in a fissured world..”…[Read More]…
Personal Notes
Each of us has multiple Ramayanas circulating in our imagination. Some are befriended in childhood, others come to us through the arts, few through political associations and yet others we create.…[Read More]…
Personal Notes
Through three queer lives lived on the margins of the societal consensus, Arvind Narrain explores the notion of love for one person and the idea of love for justice as empathy for the suffering ‘other.’ …[Read More]…
Personal Notes
The digital world where information instead of knowledge is found at the click of a button may have finally nailed the coffin on critical thinking says Darius Cooper who despairs that today’s students may have run back to Plato’s Cave, content to watch flickering shadows.…[Read More]…
Personal Notes
The government has failed to perform the most basic of the responsibilities given to it by the people, say ex-civil servants in an open letter to the PM. But they also add, “We, in turn, have failed as a society that took pride in its ethical, spiritual and cultural heritage and which treasured its values of tolerance, compassion and fellow feeling.” …[Read More]…
Personal Notes
“At this inevitable parting, how does one invoke reminiscences of that vivacious vitality that was Varis Alvi (Vāriṡ ʿAlavī)? There is a singular incongruity in referring to him in the past tense, for it would be in keeping with him to persevere unwaveringly in our dimension”, says poet Riyaz Latif in his “requiem for a friend.” …[Read More]…
Personal Notes
A college started in the ‘Widow’s Palace’ altered a whole society’s perspective on women; then, everything fell apart—in the crosshairs of sectarian violence. Neerja Mattoo traces the rise and fall of women empowerment and a syncretic culture in in Kashmir.…[Read More]…
Personal Notes
To succumb to slavish complicity with the princes of the world for some crumbs or to stand firm for Truth and Justice–that choice involves the decision of existence with no soft option. And truth,born in tragic thought in the abyss of freedom articulated through poetry, art philosophy must be sought for that infinite contestation with the hegemonic powers in place, says Saitya Brata Das.…[Read More]…
Personal Notes
Reflecting on Michelangelo’s “Art” after a visit to Italy KP Shankaran raises questions about the originality of his work. He considers him a skilled craftsman but finds ‘artistic’ merit only in his unfinished works.…[Read More]…
Personal Notes
In an age of globalization, the project of Swaraj is still incomplete wrote Ananya Vajpeyi in 2009, the centenary year of Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj. Today, more than ever before, Gandhi is appropriate because an Indian sovereignty that encloses its poor, its minorities, its separatist and dissenting constituencies in zones of exception and abandons them to the most egregious forms of violence and deprivation is not consistent with the idea of swaraj. …[Read More]…
Personal Notes
What happens when a girl/woman needs an abortion? Madhuri Sastry recounts the story of one such woman and draws a grim picture of women not in control of their own bodies in India–70 years into its ‘freedom’. …[Read More]…
Personal Notes
Nandita Dinesh reflects on her experiences with immersive theatre in conflict zones around the world—Guatemala, Kashmir, Rwanda. Her Introduction sets the tone for journeys to confluences of art and conflict.…[Read in Full]…
