“I hear the lower castes are finding this lack of monsoons rather difficult for their crops,” droned Aashka’s father at their lavish supper (as usual), in the midst of her father’s normal dull conversing with the other Brahmins. The table was long and elegant and filled every night with rich Brahmins, such as Aashka’s family. […]
The post A Dalit and a Brahmin first appeared on Dissident Voice.
“I hear the lower castes are finding this lack of monsoons rather difficult for their crops,” droned Aashka’s father at their lavish supper (as usual), in the midst of her father’s normal dull conversing with the other Brahmins. The table was long and elegant and filled every night with rich Brahmins, such as Aashka’s family. Most of them were reserved[Read More...]
Introduction–While this story is written more as a fantasy on what happens when Mahatma Gandhi decides to come back to earth, it is at the same time related to serious contemporary problems and issues. Among the many distinguished residents of heaven, Mahatma Gandhi was regarded as among the most peaceful and patient ones. Yet even he had of late shown[Read More...]
This is a six-part novella about the struggles of young people to save their endangered housing complex, symbolic of the much bigger efforts needed to protect the badly endangered life nurturing conditions of our planet. Here fact and fantasy are combined to create interesting situations which are symbolic of the wider critical issues of our times. 1 The Inspector from[Read More...]
Writing is not a searching about in the daily experience for apt similes and pretty thoughts and images… It is not a conscious recording of the day’s experiences ‘freshly and with the appearance of reality’… The writer of imagination would find himself released from observing things for the purpose of writing them down later. He […]
The post A Million and One Ideas that Would Transform the Globe first appeared on Dissident Voice.
JT loves drawing sandhill cranes. Extruded from memory, JT sits on the sagging bumper of the Ford RV as he pushes capillaries of charcoal into the sky he delivers on the sketch pad paper.
Unending fire sky, he tells himself. He wants to imagine the sky this way, Turneresque, electric, something like all those village buildings he left behind in Huehuetenango what seems like a life time ago.
I’m writing this letter to myself. I need to talk to someone, even it is only myself. I need to believe that what happened was real.
All that I know of the past was learned by word-of-mouth histories from those who came before me and those few historians who remain now. Some matters I know directly. We don’t talk much anymore to each other because it takes too much physical effort. It has been tiring to write this letter by the dim light available to me either in or outdoors, day or night. But it helps to distract me from the situation everyone is in.
“We are here at the National Bean Counters Convention with Martin Long, chairman of the Bean Counters Board. Good evening, Mr. Long.”
“Hello, Sarah, nice of you to have me on.”
“Our pleasure. Earlier this evening, in your keynote address to this convention, you called for a nationwide job action next Friday in order to impress upon this country the critical services that Bean Counters, especially in the healthcare industry, provide each and every day.”
It is an age-old question as to the extent art reflects the world we live in. Bertolt Brecht allegedly said to the contrary that art was “not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.” The Marxist German playwright devised theatrical methods designed to distance the audience from the staged drama while drawing self-reflexive attention to the contrived nature of the spectacle itself.
It was the summer of 1876. The great white father was demanding that we sell our land to them – land that was not ours to sell – and then move to the reservation – where only hardships and starvation awaited us. The buffalo was dying fast as white hunters shot them on the plain, taking only their skins and leaving their carcasses to rot on the plains.
