Kazi Nazrul Islam Translation © 2020 Monish Chatterjee [A YouTube recitation by the poet’s son, Kazi Sabyasachi: I am the poet of now, not of the Nuevo future Call me poetic, call me prosaic, I accept with nary a word. Some tell me, “Your place is with the earth-bound, The mortal – why do we not witness emerging From your[Read More...]
Ethical media practices have constantly engaged with creating more space for under-privileged, and under-represented voices. With the advent of the pandemic, social distancing, and the necessary isolation of quarantines and containment zones, representing and communicating the common man’s woes and perspective has become a daunting, but doubly urgent,task. This is especially exacerbated when those in power take advantage of the[Read More...]
W.H. Auden, the British poet, once wrote that many lives have been lived without love, but none without water – or words to that effect. Auden couldn’t possibly have written about the utter necessity of water without thinking of the billions and trillions of farming families who contributed since time immemorial to the making of human cultures and civilizations. If[Read More...]
Fifty two years ago, on 20th August, Russian tanks moved into Prague to suppress what has passed into history as the ‘Spring of 1968’ when artists, intellectuals, public personalities and reforms-minded politicians joined hands in an attempt to secure freedom of expression. Among the sufferers was the great long-distance runner, Emil Zatopek, who was dismissed from his senior position[Read More...]
Today is the 30th death anniversary of legendary playback singer Mohammad Rafi. Rafi Saheb passed away on 31st July, 1980. We also remember Munshi Prem Chand doyen of Hindi writing on his 140th birthday. But there is another important day today which is the martyrdom day of Shaheed Udham Singh who was executed by the British for killing General Micheal[Read More...]
A common concept today about the children portrayed in Victorian literature is that they are innocent in spite of their sufferings and brutalization by the society. One can refer to an apotheosis of childhood innocence through characters like Dickens’s Oliver Twist, Little Nell in Old Curiosity Shop, and Pip in Great Expectations, or Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. During the Victorian era morality and didacticism[Read More...]
once i used to be complete one whole there were no parts of me but now i am mincemeat you have done this to me since millennia you are ripping me apart pulling me to shreds scratching my body with lines and cutting me into bits bits you proudly call your own but, strangely each time after you cut out[Read More...]
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K. P. Kumaran made his first film, Athithi (b/w, 35 mm., 112 mins.) in 1974. I was able to catch up with it in 2017, thanks to a retrospective devoted to the veteran director at the 22nd edition of the International Film Festival of Kerala. Athithi is a tense family drama that unfolds, for the most part, within the ghostly[Read More...]
In ways more than one, Quarter Number 4/11, a documentary about demolitions and displacements and resultant miseries to a defenseless but defiant working class family, is reminiscent of Anand Patwardhan’s epic Hamara Shahar, made a quarter century earlier. “Quarter Number 4/11 is a ground-zero perspective of urban real estate development, narrated through the plight of ex-factory worker Shambhu Prasad Singh,[Read More...]
I am not a polyglot. I am unbeknownst to Urdu-my mother’s language for I am the unfortunate generation who learnt English as well as Urdu sonnets but without Urdu in its script and is one who can hardly scramble through Urdu in its Persian form, just by virtue of tying its tit-bits conforming ever to their orthographic details. But, I[Read More...]
