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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).

64 articles published

The Right to Be Ordinary

Uncategorized

The Right to Be Ordinary

Jason Arday and the Racial Politics of Britain Now Professor Jason Arday’s tragic story sits where three racial logics collide: the declining solidarities of British political Blackness; the corporate and institutional representationalism that followed Black Lives Matter; and a restorationist Right that treats conspicuous Black advancement as presumptive evidence that merit has been displaced. B…

ByNarendra PachkhédéAugust 23, 20260Comments

The Theft of the Present

The Theft of the Present

Gen Z, the Emergency, and the Making of a Usable Indian Past B I have spent enough of my writing life asking history to help me understand the present to know how tempting it can be. An earlier event steadies what feels uncertain now. It gives us names, sequences, people we already know how to…

ByNarendra PachkhédéAugust 12, 20260Comments

When the Oar Leaves the Sea

When the Oar Leaves the Sea

Christopher Nolan returns Homer to the scale of cinematic spectacle. More than half a century earlier, Sitanshu Yashaschandra’s Odysseusnu Halesu followed the oar beyond Ithaca, using its estrangement to rethink homecoming, poetic authority and the unequal life of world literature. Christopher Nolan has returned Homer to the scale at which contemporary culture most readily…

ByNarendra PachkhédéAugust 8, 20260Comments

Out of Syllabus: Language, Ideology and the New Vernacular Against Political Orthodoxy

Out of Syllabus: Language, Ideology and the New Vernacular Against Political Orthodoxy

India’s Gen Z revolt did not stop at mocking Modi. It entered the home, broke the family relay through which Hindutva reproduced itself, and turned inherited obedience into open political defiance. To understand the language of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), one must resist deciding in advance what kind of politics it represents. The movement…

ByNarendra PachkhédéJuly 29, 20260Comments

The State of Waiting

The State of Waiting

Paper Leaks, Hunger Strikes, and the Politics of Exhaustion “This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’” —Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963 I. The Temporal Constitution Every democracy possesses a temporal constitution. Like every political order, it distributes time before it distributes resources: deciding who must wait,…

ByNarendra PachkhédéJuly 20, 20260Comments

Falsafa Goes Viral

Philosophy POLITICS

Falsafa Goes Viral

Pakistan’s YouTube philosophy boom marks the rise of a vernacular counter-university: born of educational failure, religious anxiety, youth precarity, creator culture, and algorithmic theatre. Its promise is access. Its danger is the glamour of certainty before the discipline of thought. A recent graduation speech by Dr Nauman Naqvi at Habib University gives us a precise…

ByNarendra PachkhédéJune 14, 20260Comments

Non-Alignment as Method

ART Modern Reviews

Non-Alignment as Method

Atreyee Gupta’s Non-Aligned does not simply recover a forgotten Third World modernism; it asks whether modernism itself must be rethought when decolonization, development, and anti-imperial thought are treated as conditions of form. Modernism’s problem was never simply that it excluded the rest of the world. Its deeper violence was that it made Europe’s experience…

ByNarendra PachkhédéMay 2, 20260Comments

When the World Waited on a Sentence

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

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

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

POLITICS Reviews

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

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