kriticulture

(18.5.1963-4.2.2013) By Rajesh Sharma I visualize him watching his own burning corpse and laughing a philosopher’s laughter. “Oye pandatā , this Kang was a dog’s tail of a man. Look, he is poking even the flames to laugh. What a struggle the wind and the fire are waging over his body. And look at the rain, it refuses to stop. His death seems to have released an excess of the five bhoots , making nature go berserk.”                 Listening to him, I try to make sense of his bizarre inner geography.                 “He’ll be impossible to replace. It’s such a loss,” he adds in an altogether different mood.       Maninder had this ability to move effortlessly between gaiety and gravity. He probably had found the thread that connects the extremes.        ...

http://www.countercurrents.org/rsharma070113.htm Book Review  By Rajesh Sharma  07 January, 2013 Countercurrents.org    The Indian Ideology By Perry Anderson Three Essays Collective (Gurgaon), 2012 Pages vi+184 Rs. 350  T he celebrated New Left historian and political essayist Perry Anderson's latest book The Indian Ideology (2012) appears at a time when several mainstream publishers with their assorted wares are proclaiming India 's arrival on the stage of world history. Many of these are truncated histories of the so-called arrival which, interestingly, do not go back beyond the 1990s. The self-defined limits are convenient as they sustain faith in the Indian ‘miracle'. Anderson , however, digs farther back, beginning with the country's anti-colonial struggle under Gandhi's leadership. His objective is to force into light the historical unconscious of the Indian polity. In the process, he offers quite a few r...

Mainstream, VOL LI, No 1, December 22, 2012 [Annual 2012] Critical History of Our Times Rajesh Kumar Sharma BOOK REVIEW The Underside of Things: India and the World: A Citizen’s Miscellany, 2006-2011  by Badri Raina;  Three Essays Collective; 2012;  Pages: xxii+758;  Paperback Rs 850.   Badri Raina is like an all-season fruit-bearing tree. And the more he ages the mellower gets the fruit he bears. The 134 essays gathered between the covers of this book and written for Z-net over six years between 2006 and 2011 are ample testimony to his engaged critical productivity. Each essay is a timely, more than instantaneous, response to some pressing issue—be it embodied in an event, a pronouncement, a person, a law, a policy, a report, or a possibility crying imperatively to be cast into action. But beyond this, the essays also transcend the contingency of their moment under the force and lucidity of Raina’s reason which, aided by a rea...

 By Rajesh Sharma Less than a week to go – and it will be a month since Shruti Sachdeva was abducted on September 24. The probe is on. The police is being blamed and ridiculed by turns. The opposition has taken out the whip to thrash the government right and left. True, it is the wretched state of law and order which a minor girl’s abduction by a spoilt brat with ‘criminal’ record has highlighted. But is that all? Is not the crime also a symptom of some deeper, more insidious malaise? To put it briefly but not sweetly, the girl’s abduction is the ripe fruit of a poisonous tree that has been cultivated over the years by all sorts of people among us. The brand of politics that has established itself as the only viable kind, with its deadly blend of wealth, force and an extremely uncouth disrespect for law, comes first to mind. Next, one thinks of the new economy which treats the spectacle as the only reality. Phrases like ‘reforms with a human face’, ‘the feel-good fa...

Rupa Publications, 2012 Rs. 275 Rajesh Sharma Why does Amandeep Sandhu write novels? To release the ghosts knocking under his rib cage? Admittedly. And much else adds up – attracted by the art of story-telling, prompted by the urge to delight his imagined reader, forced by the market’s monstrous hand. Paradoxically, despite a few avoidable, sometimes clichéd, musings on language and literary theory, the stock of additions includes a host of deletions that lurk spectrally under the printed words and make me wish, like a lover in fairy tales, for an undelete button that would be embedded somewhere in the novel. I dream of a publishing utopia in which the writer, like Marcel Proust’s ideal writer, does not have to be anxious about anyone’s approving eye.             Like his first novel Sepia Leaves (2008), this one too – his second – is a fruit of Sandhu’s struggle to come to terms with a difficult past. “ My attem...

A letter from the teachers to the teachers of Punjabi University (Part of the Campaign by Teachers for Intervention in Education) 19 September 2012 Dear Friend,     The PUTA polls are over, and yet not over. The electoral process has been stalled, and on ridiculous alibis - evidence enough that substantial reasons do not exist for doing what has been done. Everyone has witnessed the reluctance of the authorities to read the clear-as-daylight orders of the Honourable Court in the right spirit. The Court has obviously intervened in defence of democracy and the rule of law. That intervention, however, has been wilfully so read as to offend democracy and to assert an excess of arbitrary power.  Anyone can see that much more is stake than just elections.     But the collective aspirations of the teachers cannot be sealed and silenced in any box. Indeed, those aspirations have been already aired and the message has gone out loud and clear that the n...