Personal Notes
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]…
Between The Lines
Dharampal examines the idea that Indians have been docile towards power as children towards their parents; if they have stood up to it, as the non-cooperation movement showed, European ideas of disaffection and/or Gandhi are responsible. Through meticulous research, he documents a home-grown tradition of civil disobedience. Some extracts…[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]…
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]…
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]…
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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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]…
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]…
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]…
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]…
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]…
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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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]…
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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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]…
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
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]…
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]…
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]…
Visual Spaces
Music from marginalized peoples who are at the center of growing consciousness of other Presents, alternatives to a narrow mainstream present.…[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
India’s rating on Press Freedoms measured by an index for 182 countries has slipped over the last year and stands way low. The world’s largest democracy must accept the RSF report and improve its ranking, says Raoof Mir. …[Read More]…
Between the Lines
In this first of a four part series on the lives we lead, Ashoak Upadhyay untangles the web of illusion obscuring the pivot on which mainstream media turns: a neo-liberal nationalist-statist iniquitous order. …[Read More]…
Bookshelf
The pandemic reveals the intimacies between vaccine lobbies and the media that create, says Padmaja Challakere, both fear and valorized medicine. In Camus’ work she finds links between an agreement to fear and passive compliance to authority. And what it takes to be human.…[Read More]…
Personal Notes
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]…
Between the Lines
The pandemic is telling us that globalization and its transmission of injustices and exploitation of the weak and Nature’s bounty have screwed our earthly home. Band-aids won’t work. Ashish Kothari on what could.…[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]…
Between the Lines
A wide spectrum of opinion admits the coronavirus pandemic is exposing inequality and poverty in stark terms. But its management (or lack of it) will do more says Ashoak Upadhyay.…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
At the window, the eye is fated to register much more than the red-breasted rosy starlings Riyaz Latif waits for. Your vision of linearity sweeps over panoramas of disenchantment. Then the birds arrive, sketching the skies in unison …[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]…
Between the Lines
In the winter of 2019 the nation witnessed a spring of protest against the abuse of power for communal ends in the form of the CAA. Gandhi must be smiling up there, thinks Sakuntala.…[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]…
That’s Life!!!
Both Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, authors of novels about dystopic futures penned thoughts on Gandhi that reflect their own visions of possible freedoms from the worlds they had created. …[Read More]…
Between the Lines
The subject of Gandhi’s “religion” has never been more important than at present when Hindu nationalism is sharply ascendant and Hindu pride is being championed as a necessary form of the reawakening of a long subjugated people says Vinay Lal.…[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]…
Literary Trails
Translating his own poems from Urdu, Riyaz Latif offers a poetic vision of an odiferous Wasteland in which metaphor is meaning, Time space, permanence nothingness, and desire is death . …[Read More]…
Between the Lines
A new report blames urban consumption for GHG emissions and the planet’s woes. Hey! Tagore and Gandhi said as much a century ago, says U.R. Sane.…[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]…
Between The Lines
For B.R. Ambedkar, the personal was embedded in the political, each defining and redefining the other; the real challenge of social change was the self’s inner transformation. This, says Mihir Shah, was his most radical contribution; his “most forgotten legacy” .…[Read More]…
Bookshelf
In the conversations between Gora and Gandhi you can hear the sounds of empathy, mutual learning and respect for diverse paths to a common humanity. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
With his control over Urdu language and the modernity of his ideas, Sarwat Hussain was one of the most distinguished poets his life tragically cut short by a train accident. Ten poems translated by Riyaz Latif. …[Read More]…
Bookshelf
In this review of “Alternative Futures” G Sajan surveys the dismal present and finds hope for better futures in the viewpoints that cover a wide spectrum of possibilities. …[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]…
That’s Life!!!
Wall Street and President Trump may chest-thump about the uptick in the economy and jobs but the sense of paradise remains an illusion for many as Philip Alston found on his journeys across America. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Scholar, translator, essayist multilingual poet Riyaz Latif is too modest when he informs the reader that his poem “Transience” that appeared in the original in Urdu in 1994 and which he translated himself might seem dated with its reference to Glasnost, the fall of the Berlin Wall and Bosnia. Not for us it isn’t!
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Between The Lines
May 7 marked Rabindranath Tagore’s 157th birth anniversary. Celebrations were held not just in India but in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka as well, two countries that historically and culturally may have had affinities with India but that also have strong ‘nationalist’ sentiments couching grievances that have erupted time and again or mutely underlined their interactions with ‘big brother’ India in the recent past. So how was it that Tagore, India’s ‘national’ poet was feted in both countries? …[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]…
Between The Lines
In our mutual animosities we deliberately ignore the influences of Tughlak, Khalji, Lodi dynasties and the Moghuls on the evolution of our composite culture, or try to reduce it to a monolithic or ‘pure’ one. So wrote Asghar Ali Engineer a decade ago. His words still resonate. …[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]…
That’s Life!!!
Laughter has always been treated as a pathological condition when it issues from women and mocks male power. The sound of this “telluric music” Ashoak Upadhyay says is part of the subversive-comedic that can be used to express dissent and self-hood.
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