ANTONIO GRAMSCI, ITALIAN REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALIST, ON THE SILLY CHRONOLOGICAL CURSE
Category: Culture
We deliver to you a short stale recap of 2016 in Meghalaya through the fiery humoured lenses of Shillong FTW, a Facebook page, which has managed to grab people by their pretentious asses through their brilliant memes and turn a mirror to Shillong’s ugly, ever aspiring “buromness”.
As we come from the land of the cleanest, highest, lowest, deepest, firstest, buromest, we need to confess to our very own claim to fame – RAIOT is the first online gutterzine of Bishop Cotton Road, Shillong. If the conversations in the Burom class sitting room are anything to go by, this gutter RAIOT view of the world is finally finding its calvinistic place in the far reaches of Meghalaya. So enjoy this curated award-winning best selection of 2016 writings (in North Europe) on Shillong.
On RAIOT, poetry leads the pack in rejection rate. Our mailbox is full of poetic submissions, reminders about submissions, peeved queries about our silence – poets are a touchy lot. But still we masochistically persist in our obsession with poetry.
Writing is unknown territory for me, but there is a personal reason behind me writing this review. The release of this film forces me to say something which, as a former wrestler for almost ten years, I’ve always pondered on.
That day, my love isn’t very far away
When pain will end my life’s journeys
When my inner anguish transcend its limits
My desperate and unsuccessful glances tire
My sighs and tears lose their fire
And my hopeless youthful life be torn away from me
Hapdeng ka tlang kaba dait thah slam slam,Ka Sngur Batlem bad u Kitbor Bah ki poi ha Sor Shillong, ka Sor kaba thaba, kaba khring bad kaba pah. Ka Sor Shillong wat la ka khring hynrei kam ai jingtngen ne jingshngain, wat la ka thaba hynrei ka i kynsha, wat la ka pah hynrei kam ai jingkyrmen,pynban ka tan bad ka khwan. Ka Sor ka pynlyngngoh bad pynshaiong ia ka Sngur bad u Kitbor. Wow! ka pyrthei aiu kane kaba im tangba kaba ym don mynsiem, ka pyrthei kaba khnoit bein ia ki rangli-ki juki bad kaba bam im im peit peit ia ki mynsiem briew. Napoh ka bos ka Sngur bad u Kitbor ki iohi shi lynter lynti ia ki longkmie kiba kyrshah shilliang, ki rangbah, ki samla bad ki khynnah rit kiba ialum lang ha la ki jaka bapher bapher bad ki bat ha ki kti ia ki jingthoh ha ki kot sada “ Ngi dei ki Nongdie madan bad ngi dawa ia ka hok ban kamai jakpoh”
The New Testament records the work of a first-century Jewish Messiah and the fate of the millenarian sect he left behind. In my view – notwithstanding some radical comment to the contrary – there is no doubt whatsoever that Jesus Christ existed, that he was a charismatic mass leader, and that The New Testament is an immensely rich source of information about his life, work, and times. It is equally my view – notwithstanding 2,000 years of Christian tradition – that he was not God, never claimed to be God, and could not have made such a blasphemous claim before a contemporary Jewish audience without condemning himself to political oblivion.
PRASANTA CHAKRAVARTY ON THE COMPLICATED LEGACIES OF THE SEMINAL FIGURE OF #PROTESTANT REFORMATION “Therefore, let everyone who can, smite, slay, and stab, secretly or openly,…
Being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature is something I never could have imagined or seen coming.
Who is a Khasi? What is Khasi language? How indigenous is Khasi religion? Who is a pure Khasi? Are Khasis hindu? Wanphrang Diengdoh’s asks some pertinent questions about Khasi history and identity.
Nobody likes to be a street-hawker forever. In fact, nobody wants to be a street-hawker to feed their children or even for themselves. Now, if the elites of Shillong can please tidy up their excessive garbage output to the Umshrypi and Wahumkhrah rivers, and bear with us so they can walk on the footpaths more comfortably, many dreams and lives can be shaped.
Eat Dust is no work of fiction, although one is left wondering at the bizarreness of the truth behind the loot. It is a book however that passes on timeless lore, like the story of Paikdev’s spring. As Hartman takes us over hills that once stood in Goa, to the court room, and river side, and traces his own story from Kenya to Goa, one gets a rich context for what is actually, and incredibly, unraveling in Goa.
Nicholas spent the first 14 years of his life in Mokokchung in Nagaland. It was, he says, a small little town, and he went to a small little school there. After clearing his Class 10 board exams, he moved to the relatively big city of Shillong for his junior college studies, and then his bachelor’s degree in arts, at the St Edmunds’ College.
His enemies say he was an uncrowned king who confused unity with unanimity.
And in that his enemies are right.
It is laconic, not quite cynical, resigned yet nevertheless still searching sensibility that Nongkynrih fully realizes in Time’s Barter. Given his ability to convey multiple competing impressions within a few lines, Nongkynrih’s turn to Haiku and Senryu in the collection makes sense.
i hear
we will be in the Muslim registry
our faces will be pixelized
irises digitized,
each finger, and
the opposable thumb
that all homo-sapiens
possibly evolved together,
will be memorized
Yesterday was the birth anniversary and the beginning of the centenary year of Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh (1917-1964), beloved Hindi poet, fiction writer and critic, who should count among the greatest of thinkers and culture personalities of modern India. His impact on Hindi literature was as transformational as that of Ghalib in Urdu or Pushkin in Russian literature. One can only remember him with great sadness and wonder what he would have thought of the situation we are in today.
No one cares about your instrumental skills
Get a sound engineer
Create an association
Play for the
Covers will kill you!
Experiment more, this isn’t the damn IIT JEE or CAT!
Don’t stay within the art-form
Try to start off young
Lose the lame leg
Don’t love the “lifestyle”
It is very hard to actually begin to categories and study Khasi Comics. It is an even harder task to actually find the copies of these comics. However, if you are fortunate and lucky enough to find such comics, you become a privileged witness and an amazed observer to the history of the comic book in Meghalaya; specifically the Khasi Comics. In Meghalaya, the comic book art form is very young; starting approximately around the 1980s and from that period until the present date, very few works have emerged.
As you will no doubt note, the recipes for beef have been ‘curated’ around the noble and upright theme of rejecting Hindutva as an intrinsically Indian way of looking at the world.
It is inarguably impossible to follow up a festival which had The Wailers and Megadeth as the headline acts. However NH7 attempted to do that this year by bringing Steven Wilson, formerly of Porcupine Tree, to Shillong. The progressive/alternate messiah. The tripper of minds. The maestro of melancholia.
3 Khasi Hills poems by Hoshang Merchant from his collection My Sunset Marriage An Old Bearded Poet Walks the City Causing consternation Among grown bachelors…
Blood pressure is rising across the country. It is caused by a new viral fever called patriotic nationalism. Here are a few images of mild and not so everyday symptoms of Patriotic Lovearia we are suffering from.
Roads arrive with an announcement of some form of modernity. Roads arrive with the spirit of the State. Roads arrive with the echo of the law.
Ghosh babu said dryly, “Cut it into five or six bits. You’re used to cutting meat. After that wrap the pieces in a banana leaf and get to the road, go and tie it to stones and throw it into the river. That’s all the work there is. Dharmaraj remembered the time Ghosh babu’s elder daughter got married. He had been called to cut the goats. Ten or twelve goats were tied to a post. He had instructed him likewise, “Cut it nicely into medium-size pieces. Not too small, not too large, you can take the skin, heads and everything else.” Today it occurred to him that for these people there was no difference at all between men and goats. But Dharmaraj was just an ordinary butcher. His hands and legs turned icy. Sensing Dharmaraj’s plight, Ghosh babu said, “Liquor has been brought, gulp a bottle, once you’re intoxicated you won’t have a clue about what you’re cutting. Get to work at once. The work has to be completed in two hours.
My wife, a Hindu, eats beef; both my in-laws eat beef, as do most in their family. My son will eat anything put on his plate by anyone who cooks for him. My daughter is a vegetarian the last few years and had also been vegan, yet she doesn’t tell any of us one that we can’t eat beef or mutton or pork; she may even taste it when I cook it and give me her opinion. We are vegetarian on Hindu holidays that we celebrate at home (though this doesn’t exclude the transgression of seeking other spirits).
On the 3rd October, 2015 the people of Saiden decided to establish their own community library. This was followed by the people of Pydengumiong, Mairang (6th August, 2016) and Khliehumstem (5th September, 2016), who also did the same. These libraries are housed in the community halls of the villages and are open to the public. These three events were sponsored and aided by Kali Kit Kot’, a Shillong-based Mobile Bookshop and Children’s Library and their partners, Ri Khasi Book Agency, who through these initiatives, envisioned the creation of a critical citizenry in the state. A critical citizen is an empowered citizen, or so they say.
Pink, whose script was written by men, didn’t quite challenge patriarchal conservatism. It merely took the variables already at hand—those of male centrism and sexism—and used them to make its story digestible to a conservative public.
On asking what kind of an audience does his establishment attracts, Ganesh points towards a man wearing a lungi and vest, whom he had just physically removed from the small ramshackle theatre, and says “like him”. “They have nowhere to go after work or when there is no work and hence come here”. The man in question shakes his head and concurs. It is the daily wage workers, like him, that form the bulk of the audience for video centres
The relationship of the Indian elites to Goa is by no means innocent. For that matter, neither is the relationship of India to Goa. Rather, these relationships are built on the willful ignoring of history, to enable Indians to create Goa and Goans not only as property of the Indian empire but as a pleasure park where they can imagine themselves to be in their own little part of Europe.
It’s interesting to see so many people care about Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, people who otherwise never seem to have engaged with his work or have had scant respect for him; it’s as if this suddenly validates him as an artist in their eyes. And of course, there are people who are trashing this choice and wondering if this opens the door for lyricists to win the most prestigious literary prize in the world (“What, even Anand Bakshi is eligible now?” being the most memorable query on that front).
Ronny Sen, winner of Getty Images Instagram Grant, photoessays those ‘ruined’ by Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan
I found myself – yet again – in a packed dingy bar surrounded on all sides by a blanket of noise, cigarette smoke and general ‘run-downery’. This dive, started by a Chinese gentleman – whose portrait hung over the payment counter – was in an old market area of Calcutta – Chandni Chowk – an area where Parsi traders once plied their wares alongside French and Syrian merchants.
The shit-storm on the internet has started. Ultimately it boils down to it just being a fun change that lyrics you’ve grown up humming are making a reappearance as high literature. It’s all light years from the genesis of Dylan anyhow, and he couldn’t be too easily pigeon-holed into anything too water-tight.
[Holiday Listening] MUSIC on RAIOT
2016 unfortunately felled a lot of greats, so our Music Section became a bit heavy on Music Obits, but we assure you that the odes and laments were all ours (no consultants were used) and when words failed we simply let the music speak for itself.
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