Cafe Dissensus Everyday

The Blog of Cafe Dissensus Magazine – we DISSENT

Café Dissensus completes second year

By The Editors
Numbers never say much. Yet, they could be quite revealing at times. Here we quote a part of the year-end report that we received from Wordpress, our website host: “The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. Café Dissensus Everyday was viewed about 23,000 times in 2014. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 9 sold-out performances for that many people to see it…The most popular post for the year was An Interview with Actor, Nandita Das.”

River Deep: The Pain and Dance

By Lopa Banerjee
She floated alone like a weightless bubble in space. The moon became her pilot light; she danced to the softest of music, a quiet, unperturbed dance in her dreams, hand-in-hand with her unloved little girl. Together, they swirled and twirled, a wild fury of light, till the wake of daylight burned their fire away.

The Butterfly Garden

By Mary Ann Chacko
Walking through the Butterfly Garden was an invigorating and calming experience. But I felt a tinge of sadness when I realized that these breathtakingly beautiful creatures had such a short life span. To make matters worse, during this walking tour I learned that the natural habitats of many butterflies have been destroyed due to human interference thereby threatening the survival of many species.

The show must (not) go on!

By Chhaya Kaul
A former colleague, during a casual discussion on the plight of government schools rightly commented that what our education system needs is NOT just an overhaul but a complete reboot, even if that means bringing it to a halt and starting anew.

Is the International Criminal Court biased?

By Neha Basnet
To be effective, the ICC must pose a real threat of prosecution, trial, and conviction for the perpetrators of major international violations of human rights. At the same time, it need not be limited to the trials it conducts of individual suspects to pursue justice.

The Gift

By Anna P. Monaghan
Pickard glowed in private memory of his kindnesses, but he desired greatly for a new language of love. This was not just kindness, he thought – this was a man’s right to feel! To feel and express his feeling! Would his snobbish relatives ever understand? How would they react if they knew François was in his will? A man has the right to pass on his legacy – it is his right! And François was safe.

What did Babri demolition leave behind?

By Mujeeb Vallapuzha
Following the demolition, places such as Delhi, Bhopal, Kanpur, Bombay, Ahmadabad, and Surat became cauldrons of communal resentment. Following the Bombay Riots, B.N. Srikrishna Commission Report had also pointed out how these communal conflagrations could vilify the Muslim community.

Bhopal Gas Tragedy: A terrifying legacy still awaits those babies

By Abdul Hafees
Still traumatized by the incident that snuffed out their dreams, some of the survivors had gathered here at Jantar Mantar about a month ago with placards in their hands and fire in the hearts. Many of them were old women. Five young women were observing indefinite waterless strike. As a result of the protests and timely intervention of the Amnesty International, the government further hiked the proposed compensation a little.

Family Matters: Telling True Stories

By Lopa Banerjee
During a trip back home, a visit to an old pond/creek in the old neighborhood where I had stayed as a child triggered memories in an unexpected way. The pond brought back memories of one of the first, formative experiences of rain in my childhood. While roaming by the pond on a rainy day, some snippets of my grandfather’s death came to me in a flash, and I remembered the downpour that had occurred then, the rainy holiday I was enjoying in my mother’s maternal home, and how that day brought about my first brush with death.

What Ferguson means to an international student in the US

By Mosarrap H. Khan
Black bodies matter as a source of cheap labor in coffee shops, supermarkets, Ikea, and Walmart shopping centers. The white folks make a lot of noise about labor abuse in the Middle East and other parts of the world. I live close to a government apartment block occupied by black folks. If you ask me, it’s nothing but a labor camp in a modern metropolis.

Haan, Main Savitribai Phule

By Mary Ann Chacko
Sushama Deshpande has been performing this play for over 25 years. Hence, there have been occasions when someone who had first seen the play in her adolescence was now the mother of an adolescent herself. Once in a village a lady came and told her that she had decided to educate her daughter despite all obstacles after watching the play.

Thwak! Ouch! %@%! Ugh! That felt good, thanks!

By Achyut Dutt
BDSM goes as far back as slavery, the first recorded instance of the practice for sexual pleasure being a miniature bedside table sized sculpture found at Giza, dating back to around 2500BC Egypt. This was possibly during the reign of the legendary Pharaoh, Khufu, builder of the great pyramid of Giza. Seeking dominance and submission has been in our DNA all along.