It is 01:00 am. The GAPS conference has been cancelled. Things seem bleak in a way that is soul-sucking.
Author: Priyam
day 2
There is something obscenely calm about working from home in a situation like mine
day one
This is officially a new era
(on not being) the quiet scribe
Perhaps the toughest thing in research, much like writing, is the self-discipline of someone in a situation like mine; my programme is an extremely open and good environment for work. There is ostensibly no-one who emails me every week and tells me that time is ticking. And yet there is something of a monastic/ascetic style rigour that comes to time when we begin this journey.
More Than 67 Shops Sealed In Muzaffarnagar Days After Yogi Adityanath’s ‘Revenge’ Warning The crackdown by state government comes days after Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath had warned that he would take “revenge” from those vandalising the public properties during protests. A government spokesperson said that the shops would be seized if the involvement of owners […]
Reading List [updated 21.12.2019]
Since the last two weeks, I have been struggling to wrap my head around the violence and the brutality back home in Assam. As an Assamese person who happens to be Rajbongshi (a rather contentious category these days) and has a mother who isn’t Rajbongshi, I decided to do the thing that makes me more […]
No sooner had I realised that a doctoral degree had a lot of work than I decided to go into the strange land of project managers. I obviously did not know what counted as a good one. So I gave a few things a good try. Here goes my grand evaluation of apps and websites: […]
Choosing a Notes app
And to make myself more productive, I took the whole thing head-on. I had to write more. From writing proposals, to writing papers, to simply keeping track of my own weekly to-dos, this year I decided to use all the things I could to become more of a writing creature. Given the magnitude of the task, the right tool was required.
The Price of Goodwill
The use of the word “goodwill” hints at the “peril” that he picks up later. Like, a host, he charges his Muslim guests of Bengali origin “goodwill” to accept the occasional snide remark and not dare use the language (s)he uses at home to create poetry. The peril – he says – is that of Hindutva. The fear, perhaps, is that Hindutva will do better what Assamese ethno-nationalism has not been able to do so well over the last decades.
Ten poets have been booked for “spreading communal disharmony”. They have been harassed, bullied and threatened online. Their private life has been ridiculed on my own social media feed over the last few days. The people have were part of the “intellectual” debate have gone silent. If they thought of their fellow poets as equals, one would assume at least one of them would have created a hullabaloo with the same fervor with which they debated the very idea of “Miyah poetry”