Two poems
By Feby Joseph
I always took a moment to look
At the calmness that lay afterwards.
At the poignant beauty of destruction
The charred remains of a life rewritten
Christmas as Good Governance Day: Is it more than a Coincidence?
By Ananya S Guha
Is it more than a mere coincidence that both the days of Christmas and Good Friday have been declared National Governance and National Digital Days respectively? What does this mean? Good governance and digitization are part of a governance plan, to be worked out strategically. Why choose them on special days?
Who is safe in Pakistan today?
By Hira Hashmi
Mashal’s killing is a direct result of the institutionalization of the blasphemy law by the state machinery to single out opponents and critics. A remnant of the General Zia-ul-Haq era, the blasphemy law was crafted to cater to the hardliners, who raised voices of dissent and who didn’t approve of the military rule in the country.
They banned everything in Kashmir except the bullet!
By Arif Khan
Ban has been a favourite plaything of the state in Kashmir. So far the state government has banned the social media, SMS service, and other internet services. They banned everything in Kashmir except things that need to be banned, live bullets and pellet guns while dealing with the protesters.
As a ‘Muslim’, do I have to always react?
By Mosarrap H Khan
While I concur with the anger and anguish that these pieces convey, there is something that makes me uncomfortable with them, not least because of my own supposed ‘secular-liberal’ belief. What worries me is the authors’ unwillingness to turn a critical gaze to their own subject-position – their ‘Muslim’ identity – the ground from which they launch these critiques.
Three Poems
By Parag Mallik
K icking you in the chest with feet of dejection and pessimism,
L ovingly looping around your neck with
M alice mangling every will to survive,
N ever able to cross the flames of happiness.
Crafting Peace Theoretically: A Case for Kashmir
By Javid Ahmad Ahanger
Let the state deconstruct the violence and fear which it has created by the power of force; let us build peace in the minds of humans so that no mother and father will receive the coffin of their child. Let peace be given a chance to decrease the demands of coffins that has tremendously increased because of violence.
Book Review: Sumana Roy’s ‘How I Became a Tree’
By Bhaswati Ghosh
She returns to Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s forest-centred novel Aranyak to unearth the mystery of man’s tense relationship with the forest. It is at once a place for finding repose as it is a resource to be exploited. Staying inside a forest all by herself enables Roy to experience the communality of trees, their shunning of individual prominence.
What ails our education?
By Ananya S Guha
We must now break barriers in education, by dismantling its four cornered walls, and take it to ‘open’ spaces. That is its inherent right.
‘Bourne Identity’: The ignored variable in rural secondary education
By Joyeeta Banerjee
If the transition time from one class to another for a teacher is 10 minutes on an average, then a school loses 7*10 = 70 minutes of intended instructional time regularly. It amounts to a yearly loss of 236 days * 70 minutes = 16520 minutes i.e.; 275 hours of intended instructional time yearly by a single institution.
Vidrohi: A revolutionary poet of JNU
By Manindra Nath Thakur
The dissatisfaction or displeasure of written mode of examination made him challenge the rationale of evaluation by the university, following which he was debarred from the same.
Alzheimer’s and Food
By Nishi Pulugurtha
For someone who earlier did not relish Bengali cuisine as it was not hot (she liked her food to be), she now likes it. She loves dishes that have a little bit of sugar added to it. A vegetable she detested was the pumpkin; it is her favourite now.
Cafe Dissensus Everyday 