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The Hollow Centre – How Canadian Elections Became a Ritual of Consent.

The current framing of Canadian elections is fundamentally flawed "We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” —Didion, Joan. The White Album. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009, p. 3. Canadian electoral politics presents a carefully crafted facade of choice. Party platforms, debates, policy pivots, and rhetorical clashes all contribute to the illusion of a functioning…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé

I come from a land without a voice

I come from a land without a voice, But where silence speaks louder than war. On our morning walks, we pick flowers, On our way home, we place them on graves. Evening comes, heavy with the sound of guns, Yet the wind rises to wipe it away. Still, the scars remain—etched on walls, Written in…

ByShahalam Tariq

Adolescence : Toward a New Grammar of Feeling

If Kill All Normies maps the ecosystem, Adolescence renders its phenomenology "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." — Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. V: The Captive & The Fugitive, Modern Library, 2003. p. 262. In the poignant scene of…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé

The Modus Operandi of Brutalism: Anti-Empathy of Musk and the Financialization of Nations

In economic parlance, Elon Musk emerges as a private limited government libertarian, who invariably recommends a reduction in government spending, hiking the H-1B visa fee and suggesting an annual fee to it so that hiring foreign workers becomes more complex and taxing, while also repealing such regulations that hinders the growth and expansion of his…

ByOm Prakash Dwivedi

The Anatomy of an arrest: Mahmoud Khalil and the State

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” ― George Orwell, 1984, p.162 “Where exactly are we in the poem that begins, ‘When they came for the Communists, I did not speak out’?” Alluding to the poem by Martin Niemöller, the question echoed across the stone steps of a New York…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé

Globalism and Entrepreneurs: The Incubators for Brutalism

The year 2024 was termed a “global election super cycle,” as over 70 countries held general or national elections. While the outcomes varied, what emerged as the defining feature of the elections was an accentuated form of demagoguery and corporatism. Efficiency, productivity, optimization, trade wars, and climate denialism – all for the sake of a select…

ByOm Prakash Dwivedi

For Whom the Door Remains Ever Open

The Land of Disappearances and Mass Graves In Balochistan, loss is not always marked by funerals. Some families never get to bury their loved ones, never receive a body, never know what happened. Their pain remains in the unanswered calls, the uneaten meals, the empty spaces in gatherings, and the doors that are never closed,…

ByDilshad Baloch

Brutalism: The Next Liberal Order of the 21st Century

At the end of the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama pronounced, ‘what we may be witnessing [is] the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government’? What was predicted as the acme of civilizational development has instead turned into a perennial catastrophe for humanity,…

ByOm Prakash Dwivedi

The Odyssey of “Nako” Mayar and his Family

I had heard of “Nako” (Uncle) Mayar, who was looking for his missing son and to write his story I had to travel to the village Gilli in Tehsil Buleda. Buleda Tehsil is a peripheral region in an already peripheral province of Balochistan surrounded by mountains on all sides. It is located about 45 to…

ByHazaran Rahim Dad