kriticulture

(Written for The Teachers' Day, September 5, 2014) By Rajesh Sharma For days I have been rummaging my mind – its chests and cabinets, bureaus and bins, school bags, backpacks, pouches, knotted handkerchiefs, match-boxes, teeny b rass caskets, rubber-headed metal inkpots, slim little corked vials of touch-me-not glass, even flyers folded into flying machines grounded like dead butterflies among spiders’ remains and lizards’ egg shells – to pull out memories long since resting, deposited and forgotten like used postage stamps and untouched coins, to blow the dust off them. I do not really know why I am doing this. It might be for ritual gratification. Perhaps it is to propitiate guilt. Memories can be sticky, smelly things. Or they can turn into powder under the touch, like expiring bones awaiting final dissolution. But the dust that settles on memories is gold dust. Its shimmer lends them an illusory immortality. 1 He tied his beard, never tucked his s...

  Editor’s Note A lot of good South Asian writing is taking place outside the dominant circuits of recognition. It was our assumption when we started SAE . Five years down the road, it is a conclusion. Leafing through pages from the past, we see many installed stereotypes crumbling. Yet much survives that seems to identify us.             What is still awaited is a radical mobilization of the elements of the ensemble that is us and our experience, a mobilization that dislocates, disassembles and creates afresh beyond merely reproducing. This would require infusion of energies from outside the ensemble’s boundaries. But haven’t cultures always outsourced? Isn’t imagination the great outsourcing machine? Isn’t literature always in another place, always already elsewhere?             South Asia is a horizon that must be transcended. Only when it begins to...

Four semesters have ended.  Again.  Yet this ‘again’ is more than itself; it has an element of the unrepeatable. I have learnt so much and unlearnt so much. All this thanks to you.  Education happens on trust. I trusted you; I could just not doubt your abilities to accompany me on the adventure of learning and thinking, of wondering and suspecting, of discerning and judging. And you never let me down. What many high-minded people thought would be beyond your grasp, you held lightly with your simple courage and lucid curiosity. What appeared opaque to the ‘unbelievers’ became translucent in your sure hands. And you trusted me. I did not, and did not have to, conceal my ignorance from you. I faced you without any mask of the Great and Remote Professor. Still you thought it worthwhile to listen to me and talk to me every day.  I told you to try and understand, instead of seeking to impress through cleverness disguised as intelligenc...

Sunday 16th February 2014     1. How How did you get to write these essays? What motivated you? I believe I am also responsible for the world in which we find ourselves. I have tried to respond to this world from time to time. As a person who teaches – and who can read and write – I think I have an obligation to make some sense of it and to share the resulting attempts with others, and so contribute to the dialogues that are the motors of civilization. 2. Rajesh, why in/disciplines for a title? Though the title is explained in the Introduction towards the end, let me add (and repeat) that education, culture and politics are ‘in/disciplines’. That they nevertheless require a disciplined effort to study them. That they demand that the disciplinary boundaries between them be challenged in order to reveal how none of them is self-constituted and self-limited/limiting. The ...

An extract from Sasenarine Persaud's review of South Asian Ensemble : "Stories, excerpts, poems, essays, photography, paintings, reviews and interviews all go into making this eclectic publication. The contributions are not only by, or about, South Asians. The great strength of South Asian Ensemble is the translations from Indian languages." - Sasenarine Persaud's Complete review here: http://poets-and-co.blogspot.in/

Dear Kriticulture Reader, Please read the following text and lend your voice to an urgent cause by signing the petition after clicking the link here: http://www.avaaz.org/en/petition/Protect_the_teachers_right_to_full_salary/ Introduction A majority of teachers in India, at various levels, are today paid only a fraction of the salaries they should be getting under the rules. It is injustice at a huge scale, and it is perpetrated with the complicity of the executive organ of the both the central and the state governments. The teachers' right to the lawfully deserved wages must be protected not only because they too have rights like all other persons but also because exploited,distressed and tormented teachers cannot give their best to those young human beings whose care has been entrusted to them. Petition The minimum salaries notified by the government are not paid to most teachers, notwithstanding the fact that they have embraced the vocation of teaching after...

By Rajesh Sharma      Another academic year is about to begin. Advertisements for faculty positions are popping out of newspaper pages.  The universal promise is of salary ‘as per the UGC/State Government/University norms’. The opening gambit of a nearly universal ritual of deceit and betrayal!               As teaching for the last academic year ended, a former student who is now an academic journey-woman called me one evening. ‘I have been told not to come from tomorrow. At 5.30 p.m. we were handed letters that our services were no longer required. All fifteen of us have been suddenly dropped as if into the seas. We worked for eight months, usually giving six or seven lectures a day. We were still waiting to receive our appointment letters…. And they did not even bother to pay the one month salary they have been withholding as security since we joined.’ ...