The Lazy Eye

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 ...

  T he library shuts down at five on Fridays, and one is left with little to do for the rest of the evening. You could buy yourself a paper-bag-full of raw mango slices sprinkled with chilli powder and salt and watch the sunset from the banks of Khoai. Or you could bike your way across the length of the campus, the well-lit neighborhoods of Sreepally, and past the empty grounds of the madrasa to reach home before the first warnings of approaching sundown.  One of my favorite lectures from our freshman year at University was on oral histories and the discursive construction of historical memory. It does make for a fascinating subject of study- the individual subjectivity of memory- how one remembers faces, instances and snatches of songs or dialogues from certain wholes. That particular lecture, and the many questions our professor brought up on the dialectics of memory keep coming back as I try to reflect on how I  choose  to remember my home.  "Travelling"...

"Poetry is like war", Dev Sen wrote, "a war with oneself"- an intensely personal engagement, the yield of which ruthlessly exploits and inhabits the poetics of vulnerability in trying to accommodate the overt rawness of the emotions that Dev Sen sought space for in her lifelong creative undertaking. The poetry of Nabaneeta Dev Sen embodies a curious blend of emotions, the multifariousness of which offered to the poet, and subsequently the reader, a chance to explore and identify an abundance of thematic underpinnings.  It was through poetry, the unfailing coherence of her words, and the brutal honesty that she resorted to, that Nabaneeta sought to confront and articulate pieces of her life at junctures of turmoil and dissonance. In the light of her failing marriage with economist Amartya Sen, returning to Calcutta in 1974 as a single mother of two, Nabaneeta inadvertently sparked significant curiosity.  “When Ma came back as a young mother with two kids and a marria...

 নবমী নিশি। গুস্করা দিয়ে ফেরার পথে, হাইওয়ের অপর পারের গ্রামের নিস্তব্ধ অন্ধকারের ফাঁকে, মাঝে মধ্যেই চোখে পড়ছে গুটিকতক হ্যালোজেন আলোর রোশনাই। স্নিগ্ধ গ্রামবাংলার পরিমণ্ডল একেবারে চেপে ধরেছে, ঘুমে চোখ প্রায় বন্ধ হয়ে আসে। এক কানে earphone-এ বাজছে "মধু বসন্ত"। কখনত্ত কখনত্ত দুর থেকে ভেসে আসা ঢাকের শব্দের সাথে মিশে যাচ্ছে সুমধুর পল্লীগীতি। সে এক অদ্ভুত সুন্দর মিশ্রণ। প্রতিবারই শান্তিনিকেতন থেকে ফেরার পথে এই রাস্তা ধরা হয়। তবু আজকে কেমন যেনো অন্যরকম লাগছে, মনটা বেশ ভারী। বোলপুর থেকে বেরোনোর পর বৃষ্টি অনেকটাই কমে গেছে, তবে মাঝে মধ্যেই একটা দমকা হওয়া এসে মুখের উপর চুল গুলো এলোমেলো করে ছড়িয়ে দিয়ে যাচ্ছে।  এতদিন এদিকে আসছি, কই একবারও তো মনে হয়নি যে তাড়াতাড়ি কলকাতা ফিরে যাই!  - ওই যে, সোনাঝুরি শেষ প্রান্তে যে চায়ের দোকানটা? আমাদের জন্যে সেটা অনেকটা কলকাতার 'ক্যালকাটা পাই' এর মত। অথবা ধর্মতলার অনাদি কেবিন। বৃষ্টিভেজা বেলাশেষে কত গল্প, গান, রাজনীতি, পড়াশুনো, সাহিত্য। তবে এখন সেসব নিরস্ত। Kasahara-র কোনার টেবিলে পেয়ালার ঠুনঠুন আওয়াজের ফাঁকে, ঘণ্টার পর ঘণ্টা জমিয়ে আ...