Cafe Dissensus Everyday

The Blog of Cafe Dissensus Magazine – we DISSENT

Posts from the ‘Uncategorized’ category

‘Victor’s History’: A reminder that rewriting history has never been as easy as it has become today

By Murtaza Ali Khan
Directed by a French-American filmmaker, named Nicolas Chevaillier, Victor’s History revolves around a proud son, Victor, who hires an African-Vietnamese investigative journalist, Dorian and an Indian documentary filmmaker, Zuhair in a bid to try and immortalize his late father by making a film about his great achievements. He firmly believes that his father deserves a permanent place in the annals of history.

Finding the Balance between Development and the Right to Life

By J. Aslam Basha
If the PM truly intends to safeguard democracy, he must start listening to people and looking for solutions that people expect the government to provide. Exercise videos may be light hearted, but the government cannot lose sight of the real problems. It cannot ignore the safety and future of people, especially of those who are poor and marginalized.

Telliscope: The contradictions of femininity

By Ashley Tellis
If Zeenat Aman and Sridevi used femininity to build their careers and fortunes, it is precisely that femininity that did them in in their personal lives. But how does one explain their naivete, their utter, utter stupidity when it came to men and love? It is one thing to say one can never know the internal logic of a relationship between two people but another to justify the sort of violence that Zeenat Aman faced then and is facing at this age.

The UN Report on Kashmir

By Syed Mujtaba Hussain
Where India had reacted sharply to the UN report, at the same time Pakistan accepted the report and officially announced that it was ready to facilitate the Commission of Inquiry as proposed in a recent UN report to Pakistan-administered Kashmir if India gives a similar access to the UN team to Jammu and Kashmir.

Poem: Slices of a hometown

By Ananya S Guha
I cup palms, fold hands 
into a prayer of hope,
that these hills do not turn bestial 
or run away with my trifling, opaque 
dreams of a town which my eyes 
search every day, for change 

Short Story: Half the Story

By Dev Chaudhry
Our now-almost-famous writer had written a story of a woman from Bediya community in Morena district in Madhya Pradesh. This was a story of a girl, who rebelled against her destiny of becoming a performing artist, which was each girl’s fate in her community. Instead, she decided to go to the school that Snehi Baba ran for girls like her.

Infertile woman: The sociological impact

By Rimli Bhattacharya
To have a child or not should be a matter of personal choice. One must assess one’s own life, circumstances, values, and desires and then decide if one wishes to be a parent. As mentioned by Jill Filipovic, one needn’t wait to have a child when one is financially well-off.

Football World Cup and nostalgia for olden days

By Moinak Dutta
Lack of availability of television sets did not deter us and our elder brothers in the colony from watching football. We would go to one house in the locality, where there used to be that technological marvel, a TV put in a box with shutters made of plywood. At that time, a company called Uptron sold those TVs here and some fortunate people owned them.

LGBH/T: The crisis of community

By Ashley Tellis
Coming out, strictly speaking, makes no sense in India if there is no one to come out to. Coming out to one’s parents is a moment of epistemic confounding as often parents are unable to comprehend what coming out or even gayness means.

Book Review: Udayaditya Mukherjee’s ‘Rhythms in Solitude’

By Amrita Mukherjee
The poems in Rhythms in Solitude are exactly that. It could be written about a far-flung place you have never been to, about a temptress you have never seen or about a love that you have never experienced, but you feel like you are there sitting next to the author as he sees a drop of dew dislodge itself from the leaves of a tree, as he experiences the flurry in his heart when he writes about falling in love for the first time.

Telliscope: Killers on the loose

By Ashley Tellis
It is far easier to wreak violence upon others than on oneself; easier to mark an Other as enemy and not oneself. This is the truth behind the lynchings and killings we have been witnessing of late and the sooner we realise it the better. This is the result of no sex education in schools; this is the result of a sexually repressed society.