Rochelle Pinto reviews Filipa Lowndes Vicente’s ‘Other Orientalisms – India between Florence and Bombay 1860-1900’, a book tracing the interaction between Florence and Bombay
Category: Words
His work is a demonstration of how to rescue inauthentic from the jaws of reality. How to make spontaneous look orchestrated and vice versa – an art where so many rights are turned into one big wrong. He has mastered the skill to turn all conversation into a monologue, and then ignore one’s own voice, remove irresolution, and erase all personal music in the service of his war-like ‘humanism’
Andrew Lyndem, 25, is nocturnal and starts his day at 3 pm ending it at the witching hour. Ratul Hajong, 24, is awake before him but in circulation around the same time. Together, they are Cryptographik Street Poets (CSP) a rap act in Shillong, Meghalaya. Touched by the civil rights/black power movements in intangible ways, their sigil is the raised fist of solidarity and revolution, the Black Panther Party logo. Although they live in separate homes with their parents, they are in constant society with each other.
Publishing is business. A publisher would consider a book only when sure that it would sell. This is why Chetan Bhagat is a big deal. He sells. This is why a new publishing venture like Juggernaut signs Sunny Leone to write a book.
After the Cleanest Village in Europe tag for Mawlynnong and Rock Capital of Panama tag for Shillong, Meghalaya adds another feather to its turban. According to agencies, EA, the makers of Sim City, have decided to rebrand it as Meghalaya.
I must have been a ten year old when I first heard of Cassius Clay, the American black boxer, the olympic and world heavyweight champion, and that he had become a Muslim and taken the name of Muhammad Ali.
I don’t like the boring drone of talk about literature. Instead let me now tell the story of a mosquito.
How I really wish that someday, you would stop taking care of us and set yourself free. I am longing for that day when you would go smoke some ganja, have some nice drinks and forget about the world. Your presence in our lives has vanquished your absence.
When I started observing your photographs a few days ago, I stood witness to this very manifestation of dissent, and sensed an inchoate breeding of camaraderie—an unsettling urge to respond—taking shape between us. I did not resist. I kept writing, thinking that I was writing directly to you: a peripatetic nomad. But to this very moment, I do not know you. When I call you a nomad, I am trying to describe your photographs—the itinerant obliqueness, an almost euphoric derangement of your frame. I wrote as if I was corresponding with a boundless romantic, myself being one in the first place. You narrated stories to me through your images; I responded with words.
Three hours into the run and I can start feeling the strain. Glycogen in the body has almost depleted and thirst has also started setting in. I have a last hard climb for about two miles and my long run is done. The uphill is hard, the body aches and the panting starts picking up, as I try and push a little bit more to end with a strong kick, I only get what nature gives me. I hit the stop button in my watch and bend my knees to catch my breath. As I recompose, the pain fades into the background and I am filled with a sense of deep inner peace and happiness. Why I love running? I don’t really know…I just love running.
Modi is coming!
Modi is coming!
Call the cannibals out
Down from the trees
With their grass skirts and spears
And how will we greet him?
Now a lot of you might have noticed that when it comes to HipHop , I rant a lot about how most well-known mainstream/commercial rappers ain’t shit compared to most underground rappers in terms of lyricism and content.
People have to be happy during festivals.
Even cold intellectuals have something to fatten their talks with
The night has fallen long ago and I won’t be stalking sleep tonight. Their guns have stopped to roar for a while, but they will resume again. They have difficulty in locating me in this dilapidated house at night and I am taking its benefit. But for how long will odds favour me? I will be dead by the morning. Their bullets will have made holes in my body or they will burn this house and I will be charred and buried under its rubble. By whichever way, I will embrace death without a shred of fear; I have resolved it in my mind.
That’s the moment when I began to wonder, as somebody who easily, effortlessly thought of himself as both Indian and Kashmiri, about what it means to live in a situation where all my democratic beliefs in being Indian were up against what I was seeing, my experience of life, in Kashmir. I was enormously troubled, as you can imagine, by what I saw there, by what I heard and by the fact that every time I expressed my sympathy with what was the visible oppression of people around me, my neighbours would say ‘no, no you mustn’t feel badly. We know what happened with you people.’ But I was always in an anomalous situation. I was notionally a Pandit, one of those families that had left in 1990, but in fact I hadn’t.
where do i hide my face?
where do i take admission?
India’s youth are after me!
hey chinky chinky chinky….
No one threatened Pijush Dhar to leave Shillong in 2009, but he realized that he perhaps overstayed his welcome in the hills, the hills which unbeknownst to him, have become the raison d’etre of his poetry
Leicester City began this season as relegation favourites and now they are champions, thanks to Tottenham’s draw at Chelsea last night. This collection of cast-offs and journeymen started the season as 5,000-1 outsiders. It’s the most incredible story in Premier League history and John Williams, a football-mad sociologist at the University of Leicester, has been eagerly following their rise.
Would this magnificent achievement, and the award change how publishers look at English writing coming from the Northeast? The easy answer is no. The difficult answer is to find an explanation why.
The Indian state’s dominant visual order invisibalizes the structure of its violence in Kashmir. It enforces a blindness and numbs the critical senses of its citizens. From the twin images of Kashmir as a ‘beautiful landscape’ and as a ‘hotbed of anti-nationals,’ it mobilizes the composite image of ‘paradise crawling with serpents’ to justify the military occupation. Can there be a counter-project to this mode of seeing and representation? Can artistic works agitate the dominant imaginaries, trouble the subtle ruses of state power, and, in the process, train a new disobedient sensorium? The images by Rollie Mukherjee that you see here answer these questions affirmatively.
The children in Nayanagarh Primary School, Jambani Primary School, Belpahari, Jangalmahal, West Bengal are all under the age of 10. But already they “know” that some languages are “worth” more than others and the one they speak at home is “worth least”.
The mosque stands demolished
Judgements have been passed on genocides
Why then is Mr Justice asking for more judges
At 77, Chapal Bhaduri is arguably Bengali folk theatre’s last living female impersonator, traversing and transgressing genders effortlessly and almost unthinkingly from his teenage. The youngest child of theatre artists, he was put on stage around the age of 8, but began his distinctive career in female impersonation in 1955 when he played Marjina in a production of Alibaba, and slowly attained fame as the highest paid ‘theatre actress’ by the 1960s. A decade or so later, however, Bhaduri’s preeminence as a female impersonator began to fade as women started entering the acting profession even in jatra, traditionally a male-dominated community.
2016 has dimmed the lights of two truly great artists –David Bowie and Prince. Both share a lot in common- their blurring of the lines of gender, sexuality and identity and their expansion of the vocabulary and possibilities of popular music. But in one area they differ. Bowie brought into pop music sensibilities from modern art, architecture and classical music but Prince developed into high art the popular black styles he loved. His work is art without being ‘arty’.
Long before the grubby fingers of the mainstream grabbed hold of the Shillong scene, there was something called Shillong Poetry Circle.
We feature here an excerpt from Riddles in Hinduism: The Annotated Critical Selection published by Navayana to commemorate the 125th birth anniversary of Ambedkar.
The Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Bill, 2016 has been passed in Lok Sabha. What does this Bill mean for people and what does it entail? Watch and read the interview of Prof. R.Ramakumar of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences
i take mothers to all the morgues
in the city, and beyond
wherever they can sift for bones
if any remain
there are no maps
The most popular musician of Shillong, UN Sun is difficult to trace. Asking Shillong music scene regulars elicits surprised disdain. UN Sun is not on their throbbing playlists of bands and music from around the world. K-Pop is Korean, not Khasi Pop.
ELECTION IS COMING! (Song inspired by Imphal Talkies and The Howlers) SHALL WE GO TO MONGON? SHALL WE GO TO MAIBONG? SHALL WE GO TO…
“Ironically, one of the most salutary features of the intellectual and activist work of the communists was its insistence on inclusiveness, its desire to involve people across religious, political, gender and class divides. “
Easterine Kire, who won the Hindu Literary Prize 2015 for her novel When the River Sleeps, beating stiff competition from heavyweights like Amitav Ghosh and Amit Chaudhuri, among others, talks to Dibyajyoti Sarma about her ‘spiritual’ book, and about being a writer from Nagaland
What good is a life without a question?
What good is a life with all the same answers?
Why do we live?, Why do we love?
Why can’t we give some love back to this world again?
DO ME NO FAVOUR, LET’S PLAY HOLI.
DHONI WAS THE HERO OF THE MATCH LAST NIGHT.
WHAT A WASTE OF TIME AND MONEY.
HYDERABAD UNIVERSITY,
STUDENTS ARE LOCKED UP AND HUNGRY.
After 45 long years of neglect, the people of the Pohchnong locality in Changpung village in West Jaintia Hills District of Meghalaya, stirred their spirits to awaken their long neglected traditional marriage system in an attempt to revive their culture and to infusing in the upcoming generation the importance of traditional family values as propounded by the ancestors.
Ballad of a Hangman is a poem about a hangman who arrives in a town and executes the citizens one by one. As each citizen is executed, the others are afraid to object out of fear that they will be next. Finally there is nobody remaining in the town except the hangman and the narrator of the poem. The narrator is then executed by the hangman, as by then there is no one left who will defend him.
LOVE HAPPENED IN TAMIL NADU A BOY AND A GIRL HAD A LOVE MARRIAGE. THEY HACKED HIM TO DEATH, IN THE ROAD. THE GIRL’S FATHER…
The made-up secular icon, litfest fixture, re-formed messenger of peace and amity, and an all-purpose son of India we know today as Javed Akhtar
It seems like a lot of the people disappear into thin air everyday,
and the newspapers don’t seem to notice there is anything missing.
The various sporting venues around Shillong were decked up so nicely and the roads so smooth that it hardly felt like the Shillong we know, love and hate. This is exactly like the current government isn’t it? All façade and no reality!
Remembering The Greatest
Muhammad Ali was also a symbol of black protest, a cipher for the anti-Vietnam movement, a martyr (or traitor, depending on one’s perspective), a self-regarding braggart, and many more things beside. While there have been several sports icons, none have approached Ali in terms of complexity, endowment and sheer potency.
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