Heaven is Only for Humans
If I were to flyWhere would I go? To the distant shoreswhere water sparklesblue and green, wavesfoam in tumultuous glee… Or, to wayward Wayanad,where plantations nurturedemerald dreams till hillsdeluged mud…
Mitali Chakravarty
A Paean to the Past
I grew up in a country that thrived with diversity. I grew up in a country where we were taught to accept diversity of cultures, languages, religions as a normal…
Bridging Narratives: Exploring Play
Review by Mitali Chakravarty of Sanjay Kumar’s Performing, Teaching and Writing Theatre: Exploring Play, published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing About a hundred years ago, Tagore had tried to close social…
Will We Still Love?
As the war in Ukraine completes a year, different scenarios are being painted by different media. There can be no denial about the large-scale destruction of life, resources and environment,…
Lay Red Roses
February, the month of love, is now coloured by incarnadined cries from battlegrounds. Irrawaddy has turned red. Dneiper weeps ashes and blood. Yet, red roses will distribute love bought…
Singing in the Shadows
Do they have a choice — all these unfledged young hands that crumble under the weight of guns— not to fight a war that is not theirs? Could his…
Ideas
Ideas are hard to curb even if voices are silenced. Ideas will float in the air, waft on a sunbeam till they embed themselves in more minds. Ideas will…
A Song for Our Mother
What songs can we sing for you O Mother, on this Earth Day? Intercontinental missiles fly. You lie wounded by bombs. Wombs emptied into tombs of soldiers weep, decimated…
Where Have All the Colours Gone?
Long, long ago — a very clichéd way to start a narrative — but none the less, long ago, I remember there was a time when my grandfather would graft…
In Memoriam —
Let us write poetry in memory of peace. Let us write poetry of love in times of war. Erasing the anger, the hate, let us sing love songs for…
Song of the Himalayas
Stretching far beyond the distant horizons is a mountain where trod the gods on their way to heaven, where mankind prayed for redemption, for a broader vision, for union …
Potatoes & Chillies in the New Year
“Oddly enough, it (potato) was introduced to the Himalayas by two Irishmen, captain Young of Dehra and Mussoorie and captain Kennedy of Simla, in the 1820s. The slopes of Young’s…
Dulce est Vivere
Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori* It is never sweet to die. Death ends all. There is no sweetness in dying. Sweetness is only for the living. Is…
Poppies’ Song
The climate is changing. Clouds thunder protests for trees turned to paper. Lightnings throw bolts on vehicle-filled roads. Viruses clog veins with fear, fear of what is to come.…
Let Chocolates Fall from the Sky
Let us go there, you and I, hoping chocolates fall from the sky. Let us go into a hilly terrain, where flows the ancient Amu Darya, where Marco Polo…
A Story Poem about Climate Change
Is this climate change? I asked as rains lashed out. Oh, that is a subject for experts, the bald man with a goatee said. We stood on the clouds and…
Cry, the Beloved Humanity
Some countries are in shambles. Some countries are in a wreck — war torn, poverty-ridden, divided deeply from the world where such expressions are only hyperboles and not a reality.…
A Human’s Song
The pain of man wrings stories of pain from my pen I cannot write of happiness as the world weeps, weeps on pyres and graves with smoke spiralling up…
Earth Day 2021
To care, Nurture and Cherish till Death do us part — A day to celebrate the Fecundity Fertility and the Rites of the passage of Time. Make the…
Our Hearth
Defaced by a virus, the Earth stands all alone. Humanity — will it survive the crackling of the coronal core? Write, write of the masked men. Faces forgotten. Lipsticks…
Holi
“…the destruction of what you people call evil, is less just and desirable than the conversion of this evil into what you call good…” — The Caves of Steel by…
The Witch Finder’s Army
Left and Right. The witch finder’s army hunts each night. In stealth, the army seeps prowls, creeps under floorboards. The army, hooded and masked, takes tiny ants to task…
Future
The tree, shimmering in a puddle, ripples as a bird pauses for a drink. The sun peeps from behind the grey lined with silver. The river mirrors the sky…
‘Syncretism has always been a fundamental part of our DNA’
An online conversation with Avik Chanda, the best-selling author of Dara Shukoh: The Man Who Would Be King While we grapple in the throes of not just the pandemic but worldwide…
The India I Loved
kitnaa hai badnasiib zafar dafan ke liye do gaz zamiin bhii na milii kuu-e-yaar men Exiled in Rangoon in the colonial British India, the last Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar…
Freedom
Freedom — All the while, they talk of freedom. What has freedom rendered them? Has it given them the ability to soar? To fly? Has it given voice…
In conversation with Devaki Jain
‘Follow your dreams and don’t be frightened of orthodoxy’ A woman who at eighty-eight brought out her autobiography based on the urgings of among others, Alice Walker, author of the Pulitzer…
In Conversation with Aruna Chakravarti
A woman who weaves stories from the past, from history, from what has been and makes them so real that they become a part of ones’ own existence – this…
Why we need a Bunker Roy in Literature?
With the farmers marching out to demand their rights in India, with more consciousness of the need to close gaps between the privileged and non-privileged worldwide, with climate crisis becoming…
A Woman Who Dares Dream Big
Aysha Baqir, an expat in Singapore, grew up in Pakistan. Her time in college sparked a passion for economic development. In 1998 she founded a pioneering not for profit economic…
Make Mankind Great Again!
“It has often been said that the only thing that could unite mankind was a threat from space.” I read this in Arthur C Clarke’s novel, 2061, Odyssey Three. The…
Teresa Rehman: The Heart of the ‘International Magazine with a North-eastern Soul’
Teresa Rehman is a journalist with a difference. She is woman who feels and conquers with her pen. She does not hanker for anything more than being the spokesperson for…
Migrants
The mass migrants to Mars stood poised to take their first step. The Red Planet crimsoned further by the blood of scientists who realised the vision of a musky monied…
Slash & Burn
I watch with my lips sealed Watch each girl burn burn the stains of Predators’ Hands till their life is done I watch with my ears closed Watch rancid…
Rebuilding Rome
Rome burnt as Nero* played the fiddle. Fiery flames walk highways, creep into homes, stalking, burning, killing not only coronal heat but hearths. Inflamed by the surreptitious smoke…
Mourning 9/11
Forgotten souls that weep for an Unfinished dream, for a life Half-lived that ended in an agony of twin blasted Implosions. Forgetting the past — Al Qaeda Osama the…
Onekind
Why does Hate extend her reign? Why do divides raise ugly sides? When will mankind unite? Casteist fervour, abhorrence and race Manmade borders that breaches create, tolerance…
Cats, Camels and Jar Jar Binks
Cats came into Preeti’s life long before camels, around the time cows found a way out of her heart but into her life. She had seen cows ever since she…
How the Impact of the Hiroshima Blast Lingers
The best introduction to Kathleen Burkinshaw is that she a humanitarian. She wrote a novel that has been taken up by The United Nations as a part of its peacekeeping…
The Tricolour
A 40 kg silver brick overrides the threat of the grim Saffron coronal rim that explodes in the stomach of a fever-ravaged populace Hunger floods the Green challenging it…
Imagine
Did the caveman laugh? Did he have a toothache? The cheering thing for him would have been, he would not have to visit a dentist. Or, is that a cheering…
The Story of Ram
Was Ram a Nepali, Indian or Thai Or was he from Indonesia? Celebrated worldwide human rights The story trumpeted with fanfare as Ravana inflamed burns evils to ashes…
Mitali Chakravarty Interviews Binu Mathew
Can you interview an online site? You can’t. So, I did the next best thing. I interviewed Binu Mathew, the man behind the award-winning million readers a month or three…
Colours
Am I white, black, purple or pink? Names given by mankind to diverse reflections of light Names given to create borders between colours Colours earlier that rainbow…
One Hundred Years Ago
Where were we one hundred years ago? Mankind was out of caves long ago and Asia was learning lessons from colonials about drawing boundaries. Colonialism was still an accepted way…
The New World
On the edge of annihilation, a tiny virus rimmed by an aging sun draws on the sap of bread earned by man The conquistador of Nature, the hunter, the…
A Renaissance Poet in the Twenty-First Century?
Dustin Pickering in conversation with Mitali Chakravarty He talks of love and religion and writes poetry that is often critiqued by some as similar to verses from the past. And…
Why?
Sometimes, One needs to get away from the torrid darkness of words. A darkness that annihilates. Swirling, twirling a blackness laced with blood, anger, hate Marginalised — …
How many –
How many people cried? How many people died? Sunderbans submerged Nearly five thousand starved Will they die of Corona Hunger or Amphan? And the animals? Biodiversity Day — what happened…
A Weaver of Borderless Dreams: Mutiu Olawuyi
Mutiu Olawuyi in conversation with Mitali Chakravarty He is a maker of dreams for writers – a man who believes in dreams that are woven in words and multimedia across the…
Man and Money
Was Man made for Money? Was Money made for Man? On which side lies the land What is the truth? Did Man for Money walk straight — From Ape to…
Where the world has not been broken…
To dream of uniting mankind, pieced and classified into multiple nations, religions, sects and sub sects is a mammoth, impractical and ideologically impossible task — but this time a little…
Katsaridaphobia & COVID19
I have to admit I suffer from acute katsaridaphobia — My Kastaridaphobia is stronger than my fear of COVID19 or cows. While COVID is being kept at bay with isolation,…
Stay Safe; Stay Home
Stay Safe. Stay Home. The birds flew home. They had nests. Stay Safe. Stay Home. But, men? Did all men have a place to stay? A place…
The Big C
In the 1990s, the three Cs — credit card, condo, car — defined “status” among the bourgeoisie. Now, another C has overtaken all the three Cs, the Big C —…
An Open Letter to my Deceased Father
Dear Dad, I am glad you did not live to see these. You died. Died before you saw them collapse by the roadside. Gandhi called them his…
Primavera Redefined – (Or life post-corona virus?)
From the womb of the Earth, She rose — Fiery, like the volcanic core, unfolding each limb. soaring, phoenix like, from the ash left behind out of the…
Marginalised?
Marginalised? Who said we are marginalised? We are humans walking side by side. Women, Men and Children Dalits, Tribals and the Abused — Who said we are…
Lalan Fakir in Outerspace
I have seen the world recede behind the trees; the world that was for you and me -- a vibrant blue world, dotted with green, swirls of ocean and breeze…
The Triumphing of Democracy
We see And yet we will see -- The war clouds turn the sky aflame The razing ground do much the same Neanderthals died of unknown cause Homosapiens…
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