in my name – a protest song
By Nabina Das
it is always in my name
that you lay claim to my country and peace
so it is in my name today
we’ll let the story be retold
Poem: Conches
By Shreenidhi Rajagopalan
Now, thoughts are tinged with saffron
dots that escape visibility,
our WhatsApp forwards with 2002 splotches of fear.
Book Review: Nabanita Kanungo’s ‘A Map of Ruins’
By Rashida Murphy
These poems burrow deep into the heart of landscape and memory. Some of the best ones are laments – as in “the sound of something cracking” and when the “dealers of grief” cannot contain the loss of a homeland.
Four Poems
By Ananya S Guha
We watch you sinking –
soon you will be a land
submerged; a
Lost civilisation, Atlantis,
killed, wiped by slow poison.
Poem: Pelting Stones
By Sutapa Basu
‘Pelting stones is a lark,’ says Javed,
Stretching out his prosthetic leg on a thin carpet,
As thin as the veneer of promises made to Kashmir
By smiling Buddhas in a faraway city.
Poem
By Goirick Brahmachari
We bond a little
Through our unbranded clothes,
Exchanging smiles
As she plays with her hair,
Expecting breeze.
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
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.
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.
Two Poems on Kashmir
By Faakirah Irfan
Until they take down your voice
Gas light your memory
Make battlefields out of your universities
Make martyrs out of toddlers
The occupiers won’t stop.
Five Poems
By Goirick Brahmachari
The stoned heat that grows into your day
The night winds of partings – half-constructed subways
Your Deccan heart breathes in
My longing
Through the hazy, yellow, cyber highways.
Three Poems
By Parag Mallik
I wish I could stand by you.
And by the little girl who struggles to rub the dust
Off her eyes,
In an effort to see clearly
The wakeful nightmare she is a part of.
Cafe Dissensus Everyday 