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Narendra Pachkhédé

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

42 articles published

Versailles in Gaza

“The Versailles settlement did not so much end the war as prolong it by other means.” — Margaret MacMillan, Peacemakers: The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War (London: John Murray, 2001), p. 493. On September 29 2025, Donald Trump stood beside Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office, a map…

ByNarendra PachkhédéOctober 3, 20250Comments

The Banality of Watchability: Nuremberg and Western Moral Failure

Nuremberg restages justice as heritage cinema—grand sets, solemn tones, clever repartee—yet in doing so, it reveals the deepest irony of accountability: law as theatre for a heritage conscience, hollow where it should confront. “The indeterminacy of legal argument means that international law is less a set of determinate rules than a practice of presenting claims…

ByNarendra PachkhédéSeptember 25, 20250Comments

A Crooked House in Paris

From Rahbani’s aphorism to Mouawad’s absurd wedding, Lebanon’s stage insists on today when tomorrow never comes. “There are two silences. One when no word is spoken. The other when perhaps a torrent of language is being employed. This speech is speaking of a language locked beneath it. That is its continual reference. The speech we…

ByNarendra PachkhédéSeptember 6, 20250Comments

No Morality as Such: Alasdair MacIntyre in the Age of Gaza

“A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization.” — Aimé Césaire. Discourse on Colonialism. Translated by Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972, p. 31. Why should an ordinary person, with no taste for philosophy and no patience for academic quarrels, care about a Scottish philosopher who…

ByNarendra PachkhédéAugust 30, 20250Comments

Sholay at Fifty: A Cinema Of Enchantment

Sholay at Fifty: A Cinema Of Enchantment To understand why Sholay (1975) endures after fifty years, one must recall the late Jesuit scholar Father Gaston Roberge's pivotal insight that Indian cinema is best understood as anthropological. In The Theory of Indian Cinema (1985), Roberge emphasised that Indian films should not be judged merely by…

ByNarendra PachkhédéAugust 23, 20250Comments

This Threshold We Call Form: Reading No Man’s Land

“Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers... Live the questions now.” — Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, trans. M.D. Herter Norton (New York: W. W. Norton, 1934), p. 35 We met…

ByNarendra PachkhédéJuly 6, 20250Comments

A User’s Guide to Western Moral Clarity

“Every empire, however grandiose, is a fragile construction, not unlike a literary text, subject to interpretation, rewriting, and even dismantling.” —Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), p. 331. Let us begin not with politics, but with a parable. On 13th October 2022, Josep Borrell, the European Union's chief diplomat,…

ByNarendra PachkhédéJune 21, 20250Comments

In the Shadow of Sovereignty

“The world has turned its order upside down; Time has traded one fate for another.” — Ferdowsi, Shahnameh, ca. 1010 CE, trans. Dick Davis, Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings (Penguin Classics, 2006) Vali Nasr's Iran's Grand Strategy: A Political History arrives not a moment too soon. With a nuclear…

ByNarendra PachkhédéJune 19, 20250Comments

The Cross-Examiner of Memory: Marcel Ophuls and the Documentary as Moral Reckoning

“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men.” — Primo Levi, If This Is a Man (1947) Marcel Ophuls died on May 24, 2025, at the age of 97. His death passed with quiet headlines, but the silence belies the magnitude of his…

ByNarendra PachkhédéJune 6, 20250Comments

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o: A Liberator of the African Imagination

“Our lives are a battlefield on which is fought a continuous war between the forces that are pledged to confirm our humanity and those determined to dismantle it.” — Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Writers in Politics: Essays (Heinemann, 1981), p. 72. As the sun sets on Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's life, what vanishes is not just…

ByNarendra PachkhédéMay 29, 20250Comments