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Narendra Pachkhédé

is a critic and writer who splits his time between Toronto, London and Geneva. His latest book is Form as History – When History No Longer Requires Us (Daraja Press, 2026).

57 articles published

When the World Waited on a Sentence

A personal meditation on Trump’s threat of civilizational death, and on what it means when power turns catastrophe into speech. It was one of those evenings when waiting ceased to feel passive and became an ordeal. I felt it first in the body: a recoil, a fatigue, a kind of emotional depletion that seemed…

ByNarendra PachkhédéApril 19, 20260Comments

Satire’s Border: English, Urdu, and Who May Laugh

The state wrote the best epigraph for Mohammed Hanif. A Case of Exploding Mangoes lived happily enough in English for years, mixing offence and admiration. Then it reached Urdu, the national language, the ungated room. Men arrived at the publisher’s office and took the books away. The message did not require a memo. Rebel English…

ByNarendra PachkhédéMarch 21, 20260Comments

The Museum as Proximity

A note on the Gulgee Museum, and the handbook that refuses to settle Gulgee By Narendra Pachkhédé Art history is where a nation’s cultural life becomes a border regime. It grants entry, issues credentials, seals certain practices with the stamp of “modern,” and files others into quiet nonappearance—present in rooms, absent on the page. The…

ByNarendra PachkhédéFebruary 23, 20261Comment

Le Moment de Bascule: Mallet’s Far-Right France and France’s Quiet Threshold

Victor Mallet’s Far-Right France is a field guide to how the RN becomes ordinary: centre exhaustion, party professionalisation, media-driven fear, and grievance turned into destiny. France’s “moment de bascule” is not just French; it is a European threshold with Atlantic consequences, and it helps decode what’s unfolding south of our border, where immigration enforcement in…

ByNarendra PachkhédéFebruary 16, 20260Comments

Fever as Method: On Tribulation 99 and the Venezuelan Kidnapping

From Cold War montage to contemporary capture, on the persistence of imperial form. Why intervention no longer argues its case, but edits it. “Nothing is lost if one has the courage to proclaim that all is lost and we must begin again.” — Julio Cortázar. Around the Day in Eighty Worlds. Translated by Thomas Christensen.…

ByNarendra PachkhédéJanuary 17, 20260Comments

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