The Lazy Eye

  "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 twisted grafting of huma

  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 works of Tagore, the

I t is quite alarming to think about how a song conceived by a Jewish Socialist Immigrant in Daly City almost sixty years ago can evoke such a fitting image of what the Indian academic landscape might look like in a decade. Released in 1967, Malvina Reynolds' "Little Boxes" would reflect the collective vexations of a burgeoning middle-class forced into a pattern of urban conformity and consumerist inertia. As academic institutions across the nation busy themselves in adjusting to a revamped, 'multidisciplinary' educational space, one is left to wonder- did Reynolds succeed in foretelling the emergence of what the NEP 2020 terms as "good, thoughtful, well-rounded" individuals almost half a century back?  " And the people in the houses All went to the university, Where they were put in boxes And they came out all the same ". Surely, we have ample reason to believe that she did.  One could come up with plenty of synonyms of multidisciplinarity, bu

  Buried beneath the pile of hardbound books in the under-bed storage is a singular 8-GB SanDisk Pendrive. Around 6 mp3 files of miserable sound quality, grainy, and interspersed with shouts of enthusiastic children pushing each other on a swing. The folder had an interesting name- "Songs from the Red Town", last modified a couple of years ago. Just the other day, I was telling my friend that it was impossible to 'miss' a song, you could only miss the context that you heard it in.  "Life is not made up of contexts or whatever academic jargon you have crammed up inside your brain". Justifiably reproachful. But what about songs that rose out of contexts- of Red Towns drowned in the yellow haze of neon lamp posts, of windy evenings by the Strand road and a white, ornate porch overlooking the mighty Hoogly on a weary afternoon? 'Songs from the Red Town' was conjured up at a 'ghat' in Serampore over cups of tea in cylindrical earthen cups. In a to

 A cademia could theorize the life out of anything it wanted- texts, digital media, food consumption, critically examine train timetables, and music charts, or read the cooked egg as a feasible example of versatility- I believe it could do anything but theorize the existence of the liberated human wayfarer, suspended between two places inside a railway coach, carrying 'home' and the 'world' around with them as tangible points in fluidity.  We are an eccentric lot. We have tea and Austen in the morning, selections of Bukowski, rice and lentils in the afternoon, consume Kafka, Ray, and Marx as appetizers before full course meals of Spivak, Gramsci, or Hooks. We infiltrate years of historical, lived experiences of global communities into hurried ten-minute papers at graduate conferences, and cringe at political 'in'correctness from the ornate archways of paid academic erudition.  And on weekends, we try and salvage our lives from the tangled mess of ugly academic j

 "Her fragrance preceded her. Khus in the summers, Mitti in the rains, Shamamatul in the winters.." Whiffs of naphthalene and filter coffee for evenings in the city, and tales of glorious train rides across Birbhum, Ghatshila, and Hoogly- memories of another time. Shortbread cookies in a yellow tin for a stay at the forest bungalow, jack-o-lanterns, and imperfect chord progressions on my first guitar.  Occasionally she would remind me that I had still not perfected my use of diacritical marks and that she had secured a ticket for the 7:35 next morning. That soon? Thesis submissions, approaching deadlines, and detestable citations were carefully exempted from conversations- meaningless trivia for a bi-monthly meetup.  November brought with it cheerless days of peeling oranges swathed in linen blankets, uncomfortable naps on the subway, and coming home to the harsh neon of the Adobe pdf highlighter. The sun-soaked rooms and their wooden shelves looked glorious at high noon but