kriticulture

VAKRATUNDA, MAHAKAYA… OR WHAT CANNOT BE SUNG IN THE UNIVERSITY? May 9, 2012 Meera Visvanathan is a former member of JNU students’ Union and a Ph D scholar at the Centre for Historical Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Meera Visvanathan Apoorvanand ’s article published online on Kafila had the courage to say in print things that I, as a student of JNU, had so far only said in private. Such acts of outspokenness are important for the conversations they set up. They allow me to believe that the space of democracy is available, at least intellectually, even as it retreats everywhere else. I too stood among the crowd at the Parthasarathy Rocks in JNU on the night of 1st May as we waited to hear the Pakistani band Laal. Before Laal rose up to sing, we were introduced to a young singer, Tritha, who was to sing three compositions.  The first two were clearly classically inspired, but did not have a form that the audience cou...

By Rajesh Sharma Gachcoo must have died. He had to. The henna on his white head, the gold rings on his great flappy ears, the paint brush moustache, the crow's feet nesting like a river's delta beside eyes old as the seas – nothing would have stood between him and the hand of death. His back had curved like an autumn leaf so that when he walked he looked like a curled dry leaf carried by an unsuspecting beetle stuck underneath. But that was years later – when, away from my eyes, the old man had aged after a long spell of agelessness that had lasted almost as long as my childhood.             Gachcoo. How did he get that crisp-hard-crinkling nuts-and-jaggery name though he never sold gachak? No one will perhaps ever find out. He, his world, his memories all have disintegrated. What remains is like fiction, a figure drawn by a flight of birds in the late spring sky, a sheer contingency against the void. Yes, he did ...