The Lazy Eye

  For the first-time visitor, Kolkata's Chitpur Road, now Rabindra Sarani, is a raid on sensation, sense-making and signification. The reflexive ethnographer disentangles herself momentarily from the traffic congestion outside the 'Badi Masjid, ' as the muezzin starts sounding the call to namaz on the microphone. It was almost time for the evening prayers- namaz-i-maghrib- and men ( namazi log , as one of the officials pointed out) were already making their way inside the congregational prayer hall. Birds circled about the mosque's two minarets breaking into the menacing Calcutta skyline as the first rak'at  rolled onto the terrace where I was standing.  From a window adjacent to the courtyard of the masjid, we sighted a man participating in the congregational prayers from his own room next door.  We waddled across the traffic-clogged crossing towards Zakaria Street, past an assortment of meats on a charcoal-burning grill, vendors displaying Islamic decorative ...

 It is always a little challenging to rationalize the archival peril in recovering the domestic scene of a late Thursday lunch- tiger prawns cooked in coconut milk, bowlfuls of steamed rice and a detectable raw mango pudding sourced from a generous neighbor- to, in other words, fall back on the generative function of a memory-system grafted on shifting home-city geographies to narrativize and subsequently revoke what I suppose is a spatial amnesia about the sense of being 'at-home.' The affordances offered by these long-disbanded homescapes open up a rogue space of archivisation- of objects rarely behaving appropriately in the operational space of the archive, evading arbitrary categorizations, slipping ever-so-often into a lover's songbook, into the last verse of the predawn azaan wafting across the empty fairground. Occasioning the turbulent rupture of self-history and self-mythology. Self- reference , even.  Not unlike its truant dweller, my 'provisional' homelan...

Back home, the curious selection of cutlery in which tea gets served has always been, for me, a subject of great intrigue. Very seldom does one find themselves holding a proper tea cup; paper cups are the usual, and on rare occasions, you might spot someone drinking straight out of the electric kettle (which does resemble an oversized coffee mug, to be fair). How does one talk of 'home'? In my hunt for a definition, I keep falling back to these peculiarities- on an assortment of landscapes, soundscapes and their associated quirks, rather than  the situated physical space  of a conventional suburban, single-family  home and its  sub-ingredients. Perhaps the lucid interval of a dreamless medicinal slumber- the comforting fiction of normalcy, the rapid, unmappable erosion of  memory  and cognition. The memorial excess of a keepsake journal- bus tickets to first dates, conference schedules, and lengthy hand-written notes- the necessary, logical instability of f...

"W e had undefined spaces to live our childhoods in, as long as we were home by dark"  The blue notebook, half-filled with attendance policies, dress code policies, and cell phone policies, the 'late fine' slips, and the cleverly concealed rubber bands that kept our saggy socks in place have synthesized into a dyschronometric actuality- three lectures punctuated by four treks to the tea-shop, a four-minute lunch of frozen grilled cheese and a near-empty conference room at sundown forcibly- and spitefully- cutting short the valedictory speech. More importantly, this cataclysmic shift to a disaggregated, nebulous  time -web was followed by a more extensive understanding of the temporal standardization that the entire organizational culture of the school system relied on. And one that I had somehow managed to flee from, in the three-and-a-half hours of cassette-hunting that was effectively squeezed in between two classes. Clock hours and calendar days have gradually fade...

  "Language is my whore, my mistress, my wife, my pen-friend, my check-out girl."  An extremely dubious claim, that one. Or so I believe. How does one tame language- how does one make language tremble with desire? How does one fish out from its universal inadequacy, the artful conceits that ornament the utterances of war-mongers? How does one filter language into white squares of grief, and how does one stretch it across 1.5 million acres of mutilated life-worlds?  Language is a refugee camp supervisor; language is a discarded relic of identification buried in the rubble. Language is the misplaced  nuqta نقطہ   that turns aab آب into aap آپ, disrupting- while also equating- life-forces.  Language is a unresponsive lover; language is the matchmaker of disjointed signifiers. How do you discipline language; how do you make its unruly metaphors line up to form the defining sonnet of an epoch? The word, out here, is the overlord. Patiently overseeing the twist...

  To begin this article with a definition of something as broad as existentialism in simple, absolute terms would be a bit of a stretch. It is difficult to locate any particular doctrine to which existentialists uniformly subscribe to- an assumption that brings us to John Macquarie's explanation of existentialism as a  style  of philosophizing, rather than a philosophy. This argument is especially pertinent to any attempt to navigate existentialism in the works of an author who certainly preceded the  European  emergence of this philosophical trend. The first step in this attempt is then to locate Rabindranath Tagore within a national, political, and personal juncture that invariably raised an existential question: an urge for national self-determination, the poet's aversion to the burgeoning brand of aggressive nationalism, and his inclination to realize man as the center of things.  But even as the existentialist critique religiously navigates through the...