After spending my formative years in a terrorism scarred state, I feel almost invulnerable on the streets of Bangalore. This is a fundamentally gentle city, usually too diffident and polite to give offence. This is the city where I fell asleep during a bus commute in the early nineties and woke up in the middle […]
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Tag: riots
Tinder Box
These walls used to be lined with books. Now they hold imprints of a different kind. History was made here that day, and people unmade, in fire, in smoke, in blood and sticky gore. ** In the stillness of the empty room, you can still feel the heat, hear the hopeless cries, the sense of […]
Why Fear Is Not The Answer…
(Pic courtesy sify.com) A few months ago, on a Facebook thread, I read a few comments against North-Eastern women, about North-Eastern people and their irrelevance to India, to a city like Bangalore. I was teaching at that time in a college and many of my students were North-Eastern, some of whom had already shared […]
Mausam: Sidetracked By Geography
Damp, narrow lanes with houses huddled together. Peeling walls, fading patinas. Melding terraces. Halwai shops. A musty little bakery with unlabelled bread. Young girls and boys in clumsy cardigans. A young boy’s shelves packed with medals and trophies and books, some of them in Punjabi. Boxes of pinnis. Mustard and sugarcane fields and school girls […]
Combating Communalism
[This article was published in ‘Communalism Combat’s’ tenth anniversary issue in 2003. However, the arguments still remain relevant.] 10 years is a numerically compulsive occasion for retrospection. Both for Javed Anand, Teesta Setalvad and their team, and for those well-wishers like us who have seen them wage a lonely battle since 1993. The introspection bit […]
Across the barbed fence
It is not easy to love your neighbour across a barbed fence. Not easy to see that history is never just about us or them but about everyone who has lived and breathed and suffered and walked on this planet. That an individual matters as much as a nation. It is hard to see ourselves and others through a […]