Category: Uncategorized

  • An Annual Update + Plans (sort of)

    I have wanted to updated this space for a while without coming to terms in terms of what this kind of thing means anymore. The more social media saturates spaces, the more it becomes difficult to create without either catering to the kind of writing and “content creation” that would gather more eyeballs or creating a kind of echo chamber that is akin to the academic work that I find myself doing anyway. This is why a website, like a private website of someone who is working in the humanities is a strange private-public interface. The goal, I hope, is to be able to document things (research, random bits of writing, workshopping bits of writing in public) rather than create some kind of content machine that is regular and geared towards more clickbait.

    And since the last update on this site was more than a year ago, here are some of the more important life updates that need documenting:

    So what did I do?

    I published some academic work. This was a co-edited issue with my colleague Florian Schybilski at Kairos. The link to that issue can be found here.

    I wrote some poetry that got published in the wonderful Bombay Lit Mag.

    I defended my dissertation! This seems like a small thing since I had already handed in my work in September. But I think there is a space where our minds completely hand over stress to the future. And that stress just sits in wait of a moment to come in. As it did for me last week, when I defended my thesis in a small room in Uni Potsdam. I will be looking at publishing now that I have my work in place. And this is one of the things that I want to reflect upon (read: force myself to work on): to actually read my dissertation and document the way I am reading this five years after writing the first chapter.

    I moved! Moving in a place like Berlin is a kind of miracle that one hopes to witness, either for one’s own self or for their friends. To find an apartment in one’s old neighbourhood is even stranger. I am learning about the new places in my old ‘hood.

    Reading more books! Quite a few people who go into academia, especially in literature, end up never reading for pleasure again. Maybe it is because people are busy in a hundred different projects with the pressure to publish or perish. Soon enough we end up in a situation where there is absolutely no space for people to be able to enjoy the act of reading that brought them into the academic line of reading in the first place. I want to document the books that I am reading right now and want to do it in a long form manner that is not encumbered by character limits.

    So that is that for now. The end of May 2024, starting things over.

  • The Beginning of an End

    I emailed my supervisor some months ago that I could see the endgame in sight. This was about my dissertation, but it could also be about the way one’s transitions in life often work—in retrospect. I started working on my dissertation so long ago, not in terms of time but simply my headspace, that writing the end of this project now seems like inhabiting a different world. In that world, I hadn’t lost a parent, the pandemic had not happened, and generally, I think I got a lot less exhausted. What exactly does one do about endings? Perhaps the more important question is, how do we even see endings when we are forever being oscillated between endings and beginnings, in the dense fog of adulthood?

  • podcast episode + archive visit

    podcast episode + archive visit

    This summer seems far away now that winter is truly upon us here in Berlin. Christmas looks like a quiet affair but I was glad that one is still possible to be able to hold on to some sounds of summer. Like this podcast episode that I worked on, speaking to Zoran Terzić, about memes, the internet, Kafka, and other marvellous beings.

    The only other thing out there on the horizon is a visit to the Deutsches Literaturachiv, based at Marbach am Neckar. With the numbers at an all time high, I am mostly wondering what an archival visit can mean at this point of time, both as an exercise in research work and personally as an accessibility concern (politically and generally).

    In the meantime, one waits for the week to being some answers.

  • 21.05.21

    Writing is difficult these days. Not just because we are living in a world that is increasingly unpredictable. Part of it is the very fabric of the unknowability of a future that seems to make any utterance devoid of meaning. That is what is true for all of us, I suppose. This website has been fairly dormant for a while. While I wanted to document my research over a year, it became clear to me that projecting such expectations is not really the healthy thing to do. So, what have I been up to?

    I am attending a bunch of fun courses this summer semester. The Canons and Revisions course at Freie Universität by Florian Sedlmeier, for instance. I find the course and its reading rewarding for the many ways it opens up canons to questions.

    I have been writing a chapter on canons and the politics of canon for my own thesis. This chapter has been quite a long way from finishing but it is still being shaped by questions of the formation of the subject called Indology (via Aamir R. Mufti) and the idea of the pedagogical via some Bhabha. I am still reading up on the idea of gestures, which I think will be a good addition to this conversation.

    On a more organisational level, I have never been busier. We are putting together a postgraduate conference for GAPS’s Postgrad Forum called Postcolonial Narrations.

    Sometimes work is all one has in the face of uncertainty. This is definitely one of the times that it has kept me sane.

    Recommendations

    Watch College Behind Bars on Netflix. Truly inspirational.

    Listen to Passenger List which is honestly the greatest podcast ever.

  • Muzaffarnagar Violence (updated: 28.12.2019)

    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 is confirmed during investigations.

    CM Adityanath had warned that the government would auction the properties of those involved in vandalism to recover the losses.

    The Outlook

    Muslims businesses targeted in aftermath of protests

    Salman Sayeed, Congress leader, whose four cars were also allegedly burnt down by the same mob, said the administration is “one-sided.” “The aim is to ruin the Muslims financially,” he says, pointing at the arbitrary sealing of shops owned by Muslims, who allegedly participated in the protest.

    A local lawyer requesting anonymity says the local MP was trying to communalise what was essentially an anti-Citizenship (Amendment) Act protest. “The counter could be pro-(Citizenship) Act protest. Why to make it anti-Muslim and target their business,” he says. “It seems like completing the unfinished agenda of the Muzaffarnagar riots of 2013.” According to official sources, FIRs have been registered against 258 named and 6000 unnamed persons. Around 57 shops have been sealed by the district administration.

    Anuj Kumar, The Hindu

    ‘Why kill our children?’: Blood and tears in an Uttar Pradesh town

    What explains Uttar Pradesh’s extremely high casualties?

    Political sanction for the police violence, Muslims in Nehtaur town are convinced. Two young men died of bullet injuries, two young men are still battling for life in city hospitals, 10 people have been arrested, many have left the town out of fear.

    “This, when we did not even protest,” said Mohd Zaid, whose father Rashid Ahmed was the chairman of Nehtaur for 17 years before he died recently. “Not a single protest meeting was held in this town. Imagine, had we protested, what would have been the outcome.”

    Several residents of Naiza Sarai echoed Rafeeq Ahmed’s account. The lathi-charge began unprovoked, they insisted. It was spearheaded by the men in civil dress, they said, speculating that they were members of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and other Hindutva organisations recruited in recent years as “police mitras” – friends of the police.

    Once the lathi-charge and tear-gas shelling began, however, young Muslim men clashed with the police – only to find bullets being fired at them.

    Supriya Sharma, Scroll.in

    CAA protests: ‘Detained in police facility, I heard screams all night… It was horrific’

    Residents claim what followed barely six hours later was a police crackdown in the locality, with personnel entering the lanes of Khalapar and destroying private property with hammers and lathis. Residents, most of whom wished to remain anonymous, claimed more than 80 policemen, both in uniform and civil clothes, barged into homes, broke windows and destroyed items.

    …

    Two kilometres away, the steps leading to Abdul Karim mosque are still littered with broken glass. Eyewitnesses claimed police had stormed the mosque premises Friday night and broken several items inside.

    “There was a group of madrasa students who had come from Gujarat and were sleeping inside the prayer hall. They were woken up by the sound of glass windows being broken. They rushed to hide upstairs when police barged in,” said the imam.

    Local residents claimed at least 70 families “have left till the situation cools down”.

    The family of local resident Noor Muhammad (26) claimed he was “shot by police” on Friday and referred to Meerut Hospital, where he was declared dead on arrival. An official from the Meerut Medical College confirmed the man had been brought in with a bullet wound to the head. The family claims they were not allowed to bury the body in Muzaffarnagar citing law and order problems, and buried him in Meerut instead. “Noor had gone to eat something and was coming home when the clashes erupted. He was shot by a security official for no fault. He has a one-year-old daughter and a pregnant wife. He was born here, he was killed here, but he could not be buried here,” said his brother Umardaraz.

    Amil Bhatnagar, The Indian Express

    Adityanath’s Police Raj

    The residents said there had been no protest. They told me that they had only stepped out of their homes to attend the Friday prayers. The Muslim residents of Nehtaur relayed horrific accounts of how the police had fired at people who had gathered for the prayers; beat up the men on street; broken into their homes; ransacked their belongings; molested the women occupants and threatened them with rape; and arrested the men. The police showed no mercy to even old people during its rampage. Men in civil clothes accompanied the police and brutally assaulted the residents.

    Sagar, The Caravan

    No Legal Backing for UP Govt’s Action Against Property of ‘Rioters’: Lawyers

    Senior Supreme Court advocate Sanjay Hegde said “confiscation of property is normally after a criminal trial. So this kind of action seems to be legally suspect and would be subject to further legal challenges.”

    He added that it appeared that “(UP) administration is going ahead nevertheless just as a measure to curb dissent.”

    Hegde further said that “normally provisions for forfeiture of property are only after the end of a criminal trial. So there cannot be any ipso facto confiscation”.

    Another senior advocate C.U. Singh termed the action blatantly illegal. “This is grossly unconstitutional and illegal because it is not supported by any law and it results in pre-judging people without even the benefit of a fair trial.”

    Singh charged that the action was being taken merely on the basis of an allegation. “It is particularly pernicious in this case because there is a serious allegation that a lot of the violence was instigated by third parties and by the police themselves. In fact, it was also alleged that it was perpetrated by the police themselves.”

    Gaurav Vivek Bhatnagar, The Wire

    Updated on 28.12.2019, 19:45 CET.