A Statement in Solidarity with Professor Shilpa Singh, Goa, who is being targeted by the Hindutva forces for her rational thinking and teaching Shilpa Singh is a 31-year-old professor of Political Sciences in VM Salgaocar College of Law, Goa (VMSCL). Since June 2019, she has been teaching this discipline to students of the BA-LLB Course that this college offers. Being[Read More…]
Between 1950 when the Constitution was adopted and today, the judiciary of India has been playing a dangerous game. It has been quoting, citing or otherwise referring to Manusmriti while passing Judgments. As both SCC Online and indiankanoon.org indicate, between 1950 and 2019, the Manusmriti has been thus used for the by the Supreme Court and several High Courts a[Read More…]
(Wisdom-King Achala: The Unshakeable) Presented here are some tales and some verses by Bhusukupa, mystic, poet, who lived in the eastern parts of the Indian subcontinent around a millennium ago. Lovers of Bangla literature remember him as the poet who wrote seven and a half poems of the Chawrjyapawd collection that contains verses that speak of the Tantric SahajaYana or[Read More…]
The season has just passed by. Autumn has arrived. Long back, the months from autumn to spring would see many carnivals. Since then, the Brahmins have been earning a lot throughout these months. Even today, miles away from the cities and deep inside the woody heart of the Lokayat that informs this subcontinent, in places where people don’t need Brahmins[Read More…]
Some stories say that Saraha was a Prince. Some stories say that he was born in a family of arrow-makers. At times, even the same stories, in different telling, tell different tales. Some say he lived in the 9th century AD. Some say, in the 10th. Some even say that he was from sometimes between the 10th & the 11th[Read More…]
Those were the years that followed the Bolshevik Revolution. Tales of Lenin was spreading faster than the Soviet itself was. Historians given to anti-Communist propaganda have since kept on insisting that the USSR was formed by military force – by warfare unleashed by the Red Army. However, tales, anecdotes and narratives that speak to the contrary could not in entirety[Read More…]
People from the Ra-khin countries are called Ra-khin-ye – or the Rohingya. In vernacular Bengali, we had learnt of the place as the Arakan Valleys that lie to the east of Bangladesh – beyond the southern hilly walls of Chittagong. We had surmised that the Arakan must have been a great melting pot of Buddhism, Islam and the tribes. Buddhist[Read More…]
there’s crazy music that rains down every nook and corner of the universe there’s crazy music that shoots up along arteries on both sides of the skull it is like vines of dark time it is like the darkest flames from the darkest chambers did the newspapers not tell you this? soon, it will be numbers – 9, 11, whatever[Read More…]
The Ancience The Charvaka wisdom is all about materialism. It is so much into materialism that it believed only in the four elements. For them, the quint essence, that is the sky, is the absence of the other four elements. For them, the material world, with its fire, earth, water and air, go through processes & systems to make things[Read More…]
This is a real story. An ancient continuum – like a play that’s been unfolding itself since times beyond recorded or remembered history. Before getting familiar with the main characters of this play, let us know of the great teller – the folk. Roughly sixty thousand years ago[i], the folk, who are the people of the world, moved out of[Read More…]
In the beginning there was a huge Man named Brahma. He was huge and immortal. Then the Gods who have always been there cut him into four pieces. From the wise Head came the wise Brahmin, from the strong Hands came the strong Kshatriyas, from the big sweaty torso & belly came the Vaishya mass of agile traders & from[Read More…]
History has it that, a good eighteen centuries ago, there flourished in the Indian subcontinent a Buddhist philosopher named Nagarjuna. He is credited with having introduced a vital ingredient in subsequent subcontinental mystical concept – that of ‘Shunya’ or emptiness. A rather simplified understanding would be a realization of the emptiness or void (‘a-bhava’) – one that would stretch beyond[Read More…]
– Remember what I asked you first?
– ‘Do you have parents?’
– One of your eyes is huge and red – do you know this?
– No
– Don’t you look at mirrors?
– Looked at one long ago
Silence.
River Shabari flows through the Dandak forests. Along its banks live people from many tribes, the Adivasis – Gond, Kondh, Koya, Koitur, Shabar, Soro… so many names have history given to them. The epic Ramayana tells the tale of Shabari, the lady from these tribes who had turned into stone. But this is another tale. Below the bed of river[Read More…]
A poem for Lorca, Gauri, Santanu and all the other disappearing fireflies
This was in the 13th century. 5 centuries had passed since the marauding Vedantic forces led by Adi Shankaracharya had torn into the sanghas, monasteries and stupas of the Buddhist. Meanwhile, General Vijay Sen had risen in coup from the barracks of the last Pala kings of Bengal to deal the final staggering blow to the last Buddhist dynasty of[Read More…]
This song is for Agartala-based journalist Shantanu Bhowmik who fell last Wednesday to the marauding wrath of Hindutva-Fascist forces who are stirring race-violence based on historical indignations and inequities in Tripura today
The websites of Frontier Weekly & Milansagar have collectively published some poetry in the Bangla language, all of which were written by Naxalbari activists of the 1970s, who were to lose their lives to state violence in that decade, on this page, where they have documented the works of nine such martyr-poets. Presented hereinbelow are translations of one poem each[Read More…]
40 thousand people 40 thousand phantoms are marching towards you right now you have taken their lands you have taken to hatred you have been taken by greed they knew nothing of this they knew everything their backs, painted by barbwire, cooked by bullets know everything 40 thousand dreams that couldn’t connect how the price of onion & flour and[Read More…]
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Our beloved K.P.Sasi is no more. Filmmaker, cartoonist, writer, mentor, friend and above all tireless activist championing the cause of every underdog, Sasi breathed his last, mid-afternoon this Christmas day – after battling a medical condition for months. I remember the last time I met him, almost exactly a month before he passed away, at the ayurvedic healing center in[Read More…]
