Shillong, let us not kid ourselves further. We are too conservative and scared for any thing original and ‘dangerous’
Category: Words
Arif Ayaz Parrey imagines the questioning of Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya by the Delhi police A thulla (passive aggressive term for a Delhi policeman)…
Let your nation sing the Anthem
Not me, not this chinky guy
I hate it
I hate things being imposed on me
NO I DON’T WANT TO BE ANOTHER MARTYR.
I DON’T WANT TO BE NINDU LANGTHASA.
NO I DON’T WANT TO BE AN ACTIVIST.
I DON’T WANT TO BE ROHITH VEMULA.
I WANT TO LOOK AT THE SKY AND STARS,
I AM JUST A LOVER AND A SINGER SONGWRITER.
GOODBYE!
Ri’s idea of justice and peace resides in the militants’ surrendering of arms and not in the State taking similar responsibilities.
“In a country that mints gold, a bazaar of bones is on show;
We’ve become holy wanderers on the waves of an illusion.”
Football, cricket and others have essentially displaced the older sports/games which were customarily played by a large number of people, especially in the rural areas.
(for Rohith Vemula) they pushed you to the edge of their village but, you broke into the cellars of their Agrahaaras they sealed your lips…
What does one do in Shillong, but observe,
Fancy people walking on stilts of insecurity.
Poor people justifying their fate as victims.
Never mind a Dylanesque aura about this town,
Which is so fake.
Never mind the so called Christian culture,
Which is so adopted.
Here in Mawlai I am clad in the infamous garb of a Maram.
“Go back to your Wild West Khasi Hills, you son of a maram”
Ka 30 Nohprah 2015 kan dei ka janmiet ka ban sah jingkynmaw ba ka Kynhun Nongrwai TARIK ka la pyllait paidbah ia ka thup jingrwai jong ka kaba la ai kyrteng “Khanatang Parking Lot bad ki Mawbynna Dew Bilat” ha Savio Hall, Laitumkhrah Shillong.
Sorry!
An apology from Muslims (or those perceived to be Muslims) to humanity
A poem by Amir Darwish
“I want to show the absurdity on the process of putting a value to a copy. The machine is made to be very blunt and open about the fact that it’s not a danger to any industry at all”
Remembering the birth anniversary of U Soso Tham, most celebrated poet of the Khasi Jaintia Hills, Raiot presents five of his most well known poems, translated into English by Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih.
I remember a time back when I was in Catholic school; I was speaking in my mother’s language, Khasi during break time. A teacher walked…
Before she made her millions of paisas, my mother was a hawker. Determined to make a better life for me, she took a huge leap of faith and moved from Aizawl to Shillong.
Rumi always has the same questions for him. The first one is, “Can you understand Farsi?” Avtar nods, even though he does not understand the language. When he is awake, it always torments him that he is a liar even in his dreams. Rumi continues in Persian, which Avtar now understands because he has lied about it, “Do you know what murder is?”
With the sudden Chidambaram realisation that Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses must be unbanned in India, we tend to forget that there is something called…
If I had not loved thee,
The days would seem brighter
and the nights less dark
Maybe I’d see the sun everyday
and feed the ducks at the park.
‘In Defence of our Present – On giving up the National Awards’ is a booklet released by Solidarity with FTII, a group of filmmakers who came together to protest against the blatant disregard by this government for plurality, tolerance and secularism in the country as well as their attempts to destroy the excellence of institutions like Film and Television Institute of India. The booklet brings together statements by filmmakers on returning their National Awards as well as essays on the struggle of FTII students. You can download the booklet
“Where is all that foreign food?” asked the middle aged gentleman. “Wasn’t there supposed to besome cuisines from across the world? I had Thai food when I visited my son in Bangalore and that Austrian stall has run out of sausages. I guess I will go make a run for the Bhoi stall.”
Raiot is excited at publishing first of the extracts from Eat Dust : Mining and Greed in Goa by Hartman de Souza. For a zine published from Meghalaya, the other frontier of Mining in India, it is fitting that we learn from Goa – that raving beach infested greed fest.
It is fair to say that in any writing of the history of western music in India, Shillong would deserve a chapter. It is just that the writing of this chapter has become way too problematic – too many loose ends, too many grand unifying theories. The culture of western popular music in Shillong has no shortage of hagiographers. In fact most of the writing on this field has been gushy, uncritical and downright fallacious (there have been so many that it would be worthwhile to bring out a compendium of these).
Only aspect of this work that depicts matriliny and what it does to girls lies in the context behind the pictures. Without that background, this is, sad to say, a blatant exhibitionism of the girls of the village, culminating in a series that doesn’t quite capture the empowered status of these girls but antithetically subjugates them to the desired outcome of the viewer who in this case is Karolin Klüppel.
I am tired of governments.
Of this one. This one. This one. This one. This one. And this one.
And the one before.
And the one after.
it felt as if you are somewhere close,
drawing near in the language of the body
and whispering a language of forgetting
to those you could not.
Translation of a poem by Manglesh Dabral, one of the most important contemporary poets writing in Hindi. Manglesh recently returned his Sahitya Akademi award in protest at the silence of the Akademi at murders of writers and state’s complicity in rising intolerance in India.
Our contemporary political foes are utilitarian fixers. They constitute a crafty, marauding band. Mushrooming like festering weed, they are particularly severe on all forms of political art.
To say that the article published by The Northeast Today about the relationship between ‘African nationals’ and ‘North-Eastern women’ is drivel would be to do injustice to drivel.
While driving back home in evening, the remark “How much free time does Modi, our honourable prime minister and his cabinet have to impose such bans?” kept buzzing in my head
Ankush Saikia, chronicler of Shillong’s dark secrets offers up a chapter from his latest Thriller – Laimu, Drugs, Women and a deal somewhere near Myanmar
This week belongs to poetry and song Maranatha Wahlang on being a Good Indian Girl And for all you lovers of fire, Lucas Khongjee sings…
No i don’t fit into your “India”, I am not a good indian girl, your definitions – they bind, restrict, constrict, They make me alien.…
A group of hindutva idiots forced Penguin (oh those quislings) to pull off and pulp Wendy Doniger’s book THE HINDUS – AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY from the stands.…
This weekend a short story and a song from Shillong. This weekend we have an old short story, Sweetest of All by Frank Krishner. A…
Chris Rock: Risky Insights or Flat Notes?
To be brave you have to risk something. To be meaty, brilliant, and thorny you have to provide insights that don’t just voice what most of the people in the room would like to say, but that takes them to a different level of understanding or provokes them to investigate further. With great respect for Chris Rock’s career, I don’t think Oscar night he achieved either.
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