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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).

60 articles published

Philosophy POLITICS

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

Fiction POLITICS

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

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

Philosophy POLITICS

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

Philosophy POLITICS

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