Cafe Dissensus Everyday

The Blog of Cafe Dissensus Magazine – we DISSENT

Life was Beautiful…: A Dalit Student Ends his Life

By Chapparban Sajaudeen Nijamodeen
The student community requested the Vice-Chancellor, Prof. Ramakrishna Ramaswamy, to show the concrete steps that have been taken to resolve Dalit students’ problems regarding discriminations, suicides, and mental harassments. This action was demanded in light of the Pulyala Raju Committee Report. A Dalit student, Mr. Pulyala Raju, was enrolled in the integrated Linguistics course. He committed suicide in 2012.

Book Review: Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland

By Bina Shrestha
Jhumpa Lahiri does it again what she does best: vivid description of emotions, relationships, lifestyle in the simplest of language. She brilliantly describes the daily lives of a Bengali family, from the nitty-gritties like eating fish-stew made in mustard and chilly-paste ground on a stone slab, to the purposelessness of the Naxalite movement that claimed many innocent lives.

Akhtar Haji Murder Case: Doubtful Role of Police

By Mahmud Hassan
In Samsherganj area of the Murshidabad district, an anti-liquor movement has been going on for the last few years. For a S2 concerted effort, people in the locality formed a civic body, Nagarik Adhikar Suraksha Manch, which includes people from different sections of the society such as social activists, local leaders, intellectuals and so on.

Unsung Heroes: The Struggle of Kaneez & Samina

By Manisha Bandopadhaya
Kaneez also works as a counselor for women in her area, under Muraroi Police Station. Muslim women come to the center with problems such as multiple marriages, drinking and domestic abuse, trafficking of young girls etc. She personally bore witness in the case of forty divorces (talaaq).

Photography: Rural Bengal

By Sahidul Haque
I came to realize that beauty is everywhere but I had not the eye to see, recognize, and discover her. I felt the need to train my eye. I studied books and pictures carefully. Gradually, there was an awakening of visual sense, or, more precisely, photographic sense, within me.

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.

Albert Camus on Death Penalty

By Mosarrap H. Khan
It is 1914. The French intellectual and novelist, Albert Camus’ father witnesses a public execution in Algeria. A farmhand was decapitated for killing a family, including the children, brutally and robbing the dead family. He comes back home feeling nauseated and sick.

Gender: ‘Pray the Devil Back to Hell’

By Mary Ann Chacko
The women and children of Liberia had become ‘collateral damage’ in the fight between a power hungry President, Charles Taylor and the Rebels, who were fighting, presumably, to end Taylor’s autocratic regime. But as the women soon realized these rebel leaders or war lords were not there to ‘save’ them or their children. Rather, they were fighting their own battles for power and wealth.

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.

Disability: Me, Karthik – Part II

By Karthik Chandrashekar
An ideal school should be like any other regular school but it should be disabled-friendly. There should be lifts ramps, if the class is not on the ground floor. There must be toilets for the disabled people. And it should give everyone equal opportunity to interact and use its resources.

Disability: Me, Karthik – Part I

By Karthik Chandrashekar
I owe my journey thus far to Vidya Sagar and I am happy I have given something back by inviting the chess champion, Viswanathan Anand, to become a brand ambassador of Vidya Sagar. Anand anna saw my e-mail in which I had mentioned how badly I wished to meet him.