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POLITICS Poetry

Temples of Memory, Monuments of Forgetting

There is no crop other than god and god is harvested here around the year. —Arun Kolatkar, verse 22, Jejuri, 1976 Located in the ancient city of Ayodhya in northern India, the Ayodhya Temple, is one of the significant spiritual landmarks. Revered as the birthplace of Lord Rama, a central figure in the Hindu…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé

Canada at the Edge of Its Idea

“Having to wait until one’s death to be allowed to live is really quite an ontological feat.” - Robert Musil, Austrian Novelist, Journalist and Writer Like a phantom limb, the unfinished The Man Without Qualities haunts the landscape of modern literature. It is…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé

Against the Tyranny of Fragmentation: Why Gregory Bateson Must Be Read in an Age of Genocide

“There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds, and its characteristic of the system that basic error propagates itself." — Gregory Bateson, Pathologies of Epistemology, 1971 The…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé

Poetry POLITICS Reviews

On Palestine And Narrative: We are in a new territory

“Gaza does not propel people to cool contemplation; rather, she propels them to erupt and collide with the truth.” — Mahmoud Darwish, Silence for Gaza (1973) Recognizing the Stranger - On Palestine and Narrative, a slim volume of 80-odd pages brings together Isabella Hammad’s the Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture delivered at Columbia University nine…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé

In a Genocide Words Die First

"In times of dread, artists must never remain silent. This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That's how civilizations heal." — Toni Morrison in No Place for Self-Pity,…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé

Viewing In the Shadow of Genocide: Soundtrack to a Coup d’État

“Africa is shaped like a gun, and the Congo is its trigger.” — Frantz Fanon Over the year, I saw Johan Grimonprez's Soundtrack to a Coup d’État a few times. It is not an easy film to watch, and it always demands another viewing. Watching archival footage of Patrice Lumumba in the 150-minute long…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé

Deb’s Dos Passos Echo: Tracing India’s Descent

Book Review "Democracy evolves where freedom is able to determine its own policy" — John Dos Passos, The Ground We Stand On, 1941 Siddhartha Deb's Twilight Prisoners: The Rise of the Hindu Right and The Fall of India, published by Haymarket Books in 2024, is an urgent, incisive exploration of India's socio-political transformation under…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé

Elegy for Beauty: Memory and the Ecology of Presence

“Land art involves a relationship between art and nature that refuses to separate the two, asserting that art is as much a part of the land as the land itself is a part of art.” - Lucy Lippard in Landscript 7: Land and Environmental Art, 2007 Christian Bernard Singer's work is a poetic testament…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé

Voltaire’s Bastards Strike Again: How the Tyranny of Rationalism Lost America’s Vote

“Democratic systems may hold elections, but those elections are largely ceremonial, moments in which the public is invited to endorse decisions already taken by small groups.” — John Ralston Saul, Voltaire's Bastards, p. 52. Donald Trump's victory in the 2024 U.S. presidential election marked a seismic shift in American politics. Regardless of one's political alignment,…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé

Gustavo Gutiérrez: The Lifelong Call for Justice in Liberation Theology

"Justice is what love looks like in public” - Cornel West in The Radical King, 2015 Gustavo Gutiérrez, the influential Peruvian priest and theologian widely recognised as the "father of liberation theology," passed away on October 22, 2024, at 96. His pioneering ideas, especially those expressed in his seminal 1971 book A Theology…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé