The Blog of Cafe Dissensus Magazine – we DISSENT

Posts from the ‘Kolkata’ category

Identity: Learning ‘Muslim’

By Anwesha Rana
My family had many Muslim acquaintances and they often came home. When my mother explained that these people were Muslims, I was taken aback. They were also people like us; they spoke like us; they behaved like us; they expressed their affections like us.

City: Vignettes of Kolkata’s Underbelly

By Rafikul Islam
If you walk from Park Street, past the Birla Planetarium, to Rabindra Sadan, late at night, you will find other women and girls like these two, waiting under the shadows of flickering street-lights. Women in saris, girls in closely-fitting western clothes emerge at every nook and corner of this stretch.

‘Are you a Bangladeshi?’

By Mosarrap H. Khan
To my horror, I found that my passport application was withheld because the space for citizenship verification had been left blank in my police verification report. The report neither confirmed nor denied my status as an Indian citizen.

No Muslims, please!

By Nazmul Hussain
The statement shook me and forced me to think that the discrimination is not only based on religious background but also on culture and language, too. I felt a tremor but, taking control of myself, asked the couple gently: ‘Do you think I am not Bengali?