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: […]
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 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”
This Thursday (25th of April, 2019), the great Emily Apter holds a workshop at the Freie Universität. While I have listened to her great keynotes at least twice (once at a conference in Delhi and once in Berlin’s HKW), every time I have listened to her, a deeper reservoir of knowledge opens itself up for […]
This year, I am telling myself, will be different.
What is more fascinating to me is precisely this residue of the contour between the two kingdoms of fact and fiction that are opposing only in theory. In the way most narratives unfold, the two things are merely versions where one layer enriches the other. The form of the podcasts – used rarely to bring up such important questions – is ripe for such experiments and we are luckier for it.
The strangeness of the entire thing is something I am still coming to terms with. I deleted my Twitter. Almost. With the recent #deletefacebook drive which has now conveniently become the #deletewhatsapp race, I started to dive deep into my own habits. Full disclosure here: I work for an internet company. Well. I used to […]
“The Assassination” podcast with BBC’s Owen Bennett-Jones is nearing its season-finale. If I could recommend one podcast this January, it’d be this one. It is so well-researched and well-produced that it makes you feel the historicity of the moment with new-clips and interviews with people who were right there as Benazir Bhutto was murdered. This […]