By Ashley Tellis
The University of Hyderabad students, like Jawaharlal Nehru University students, and like students everywhere in this beleaguered country, are used to this sort of heckling, harassment and intimidation and continue to stand their ground, somewhat tiredly. It is a sad, sad country we live in.
By Ashley Tellis
It tells us something about the nature of our commitment to the principles of democracy that we capitulate so easily to pressure from goonda politics. All that needs to be done, it appears is to threaten violence and institutions cower, apologies pour forth. This shows that we are living in a goonda raj and not in a democracy.
By Ashley Tellis
There is no substitute for struggles on the ground, no matter how difficult these are. In the JNU case, it cannot but be a struggle on the ground and many academics from there (including ones excoriated for asking for a withdrawal from social media activism in an earlier moment) have already issued a statement against the punishment and will doubtless start a campaign against it in JNU.
By Ashley Tellis
Migrant labourers build the cities and towns we live in, clean the garbage we produce and survive on the less than minimum wage they earn, living away from their homes where they cannot even produce enough to survive, which is why they become migrant labour, and for their pains we turn on them and hound them out of cities and towns.
By Ashley Tellis
What we always needed, and still need, now is a public, collective struggle for a public, political identity as homosexual. Minority rights are public rights, not private ones.
By Ashley Tellis
If you study the manifestos of Naxals since the 60s, their demands fall well within the Constitution. They demand rights for the underprivileged. What makes these demands illegitimate to the state which claims to protect those very rights?
By Ashley Tellis
How is it that we express no outrage at this continuum of violent institutions from the family to the state but focus on custodial institutions which shelter the detritus from these other institutions? Because it is easy to do. It is also really convenient.
By Ashley Tellis
What is marriage if not a form of sanctified rape? We do not think marital rape even imaginable as a criminal category because it blows open the lid on the fact that marriage is a form of rape: a ceremonial, ritualistic, marketized, and glitzy sanction to rape.
By Ashley Tellis
If politicians get to decide academic standards, decide which institutions will get money and which will not, which will shut down and which will not, which one is performing well and which not, who will pay how much fees, who will enroll and what they will study, we can be sure that academic standards will not be the criteria at all but ideological boot-licking will.
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.
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.
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.
Cafe Dissensus Everyday 