Arsh K.S
On the difficulty of interpretation
It is not easy to posit a reason or cause when faced with misfortune, even if the degree is relatively minor. The term gaslighting has been used to describe what in college campuses are occasionally referred to as microaggressions. The way these are treated tend to range from outright dismissal, as is often the case when the perspective which deems it such may have confronted rather more direct or abusive forms of violence. Or they are incorporated into what is commonly understood as the culture of a campus or milieu.
'Pew' by Catherine Lacey
An unnamed protagonist, if this word is still suitable for the character in question, is found on the Pew of a church, asleep. The service awakens her, I presume the gender, and she is shown kindness by a family who takes her in.
Response to 'Zombie Apocalypse and How Not to End Capitalism'
You can find the original essay in this link - https://radicalnotes.org/2016/05/18/zombie-apocalypse-and-how-not-to-end-capitalism/
Review of 'Neoliberalism and Hindutva' by Shankar Gopalakrishnan
I had written this review four years ago and the events of the subsequent years have further emphasised how important this book is. Today we are in the midst of a set of coordinates that are accurately placed forth in Shankar Gopalakrishnan’s Neoliberalism and Hindutva: Fascism, Free Markets and the Restructuring of Indian Capitalism (2009). The aftermath of the 2014 (and now 2019) general elections in India have been most ominous with a rise in hate crimes against communities and the entrenchment of moral police at multiple levels of our social reality, be it the media, in educational institutions and in the streets. I strongly feel these conditions have ossified after the mandate received by the BJP in the 2019 general elections.
Children ask bleak questions
Children ask bleak questions. ‘What is worse than death?” Unfreedom perhaps. But a child knows that rare feeling of being attached to sorrow -
Away
I am not a name The person that I was perished with the dreams that held him together Though I still remember them.
Character as situational allegory in Altaf Tyrewala's 'No God In Sight'
A character in the form of the novel produced today cannot behave in the way in which they did in the period of the bildungsroman. Or, put differently the singular focus on select characters to sketch a depiction of the totality of their lives and efforts is possible today primarily in the genre of memoirs and autobiographies. When a novel cannot resort to such a sustained first person account of oneself, when it slips out of its closeted confessional register which since the Victorians evaluated romances and finances, the use that it makes of character has to change. This is where it is of my interest to examine Altaf Tyrewala’s ‘No God In Sight’ (2005) – a novel that draws on several colliding narratives which appear as snapshots or perhaps postcards of people in their abject entrenching into the professions and personal plights that animate them, to present a representation of metropolitan Mumbai and its periphery. Here the subject is the space of the city itself, with the characters serving as episodic points who illustrate the situation of their lives, perhaps weaving together, in a new way a social imaginary or totality if you prefer which barely resembles historical or mythological epics which traditionally fulfilled this role.
Emulated forms of cultural expression & the place of interfaces
'Structure no more subtracts an ‘empirical’ content from a ‘natural’ object than it adds ‘the intelligible’ to it.' - Jaques Alain Milner, Action of the Structure, 1964
