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Narendra Pachkhédé

is a critic and writer who splits his time between Toronto, London and Geneva.

52 articles published

The Ethics of Staying: Béla Tarr and the Cinema of Endurance

Béla Tarr’s films transformed slowness into an ethical demand. Refusing narrative relief and political optimism, he made endurance of time, history, and looking the condition of cinema itself. “There is no way out.” —László Krasznahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance, trans. George Szirtes (New York: New Directions, 1998), passim. There are filmmakers whose deaths feel…

ByNarendra PachkhédéJanuary 7, 20260Comments

Mohammad Bakri and the Custody of Palestinian Cinema

Mohammad Bakri’s death marks more than the loss of a major actor and filmmaker. It exposes the conditions under which Palestinian cinema has been forced to exist. “Even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.” — Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940), Thesis VI …

ByNarendra PachkhédéDecember 26, 20250Comments

The Walking Prophet

PART TWO In this intimate conversation, Sultan Somjee traces a quiet revolution in how peace is understood and practised, drawing on the philosophy of Utu to challenge bureaucratised reconciliation and recover peace as a relational, embodied act grounded in memory, land, and communal life. READ PART ONE The Path of Peace I asked…

ByNarendra PachkhédéDecember 25, 20250Comments

The Walking Prophet

Sultan Somjee, an African humanist’s quiet revolution in how we walk, remember, and reconcile, grounded in a relational humanism rooted in the philosophy of Utu. The step, trivial and unremarked, is a small act of covenant. To walk is to re-enter that covenant again and again, each stride a renewal of belonging. The…

ByNarendra PachkhédéDecember 21, 20250Comments

End of Islam?

Reading Faisal Devji’s Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam, 280 Pages, 2025, that traces how Islam ceased to function as a political actor, why the Muselmann reveals the truth of our age, and what forms of Muslim agency may emerge once ideology dissolves and ethical life returns to the centre. For almost a…

ByNarendra PachkhédéDecember 12, 20250Comments

Aki Nawaz and the Politics of Sonic Citizenship

A short film opens a long-buried chapter of postwar Britain, where music became argument, Nation Records became counter-infrastructure, and Aki Nawaz refused to let multiculturalism settle into décor. Britain has begun to look and sound like its own archive. The recent 'United the Kingdom' march, fronted by Tommy Robinson and swelling beyond 110,000, was…

ByNarendra PachkhédéDecember 7, 20250Comments

Cotton Queen: How a Girl Burns the House of Empire

A girl in a cotton field, a bungalow set alight, a nation in exile that still insists on seeing itself. In Cotton Queen, Suzannah Mirghani turns Sudan’s most familiar landscape into a site of refusal, memory, and fragile futurity. Cotton in Sudan has always worn a mask. At dawn, a field looks harmless enough: wisps…

ByNarendra PachkhédéNovember 29, 20250Comments

The Mamdani Moment : Politics After the Age of Performance

Zohran Mamdani’s election isn’t just a win for the left, it’s a generational revolt against rhetorical politics, moral evasiveness, and the exhaustion of governance by performance. History rarely announces its turning points. It can arrive as spectacle or as slow erosion, as collapse or quiet reordering. The election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New…

ByNarendra PachkhédéNovember 15, 20250Comments

A Quiet Epic of Absence

"I am cold and I think / I will never feel warm again." — Forugh Farrokhzad's poem Another Birth (Tavalodi Digar, 1964). Premiered in Competition this Fall at the 30th Busan International Film Festival (BIFF), Isabelle Kalandar's debut feature Another Birth marked the arrival of a filmmaker whose vision is at once intimate and elemental.…

ByNarendra PachkhédéNovember 6, 20250Comments

The Peace That Played Itself: Sharm el-Sheikh and the Spectacle of Power

“Peace is the coded continuation of war by other means.” —Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), p. 15. It was wall-to-wall Trump. Donald Trump’s Peace 2025 summit in Sharm el-Sheikh resembled a television production more than a peace…

ByNarendra PachkhédéOctober 16, 20250Comments