Umar Nizar Quality vs energy is the major thesis of the Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn who held daily workshops at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2018. The ‘meritocratic’ pretensions of third world elite are brutally dispelled by his radical stance. It is ironical that there are ‘radical’ collectives foisting rotten idealism, in the guise of …
Time to destroy the stereotypes about Dalit occupations
Anurag Minus Verma Recently many of us have seen/read news about a few Indians thanking sanitation workers (read Dalits) with flowers for combating the corona pandemic on the streets. Such rare gestures look pleasant but this doesn’t change the fact that these are mere gestures1. It is no surprise that in these emergency times, many …
Personal is Intellectual
Zeeshan Husain As a young student of social sciences, I heard the phrase “personal is political” from a teacher who dealt with gender issues. I could sense that it meant our personal lives are somewhat a microcosm of the political (and social) reality in which we live. We, as members of the society, practice those …
Does Arundhati Roy have any other qualification than her stardom?
[This interview with Sunny M. Kapicadu appeared first in the online Malayalam portal Utharakalam on April 17, 2014. He was interviewed by Dr O. K. Santhosh, Assistant Professor, University of Madras. Sunny M. Kapicadu is one of the most prominent Dalit activists and intellectuals in Kerala. He has been active in all the subaltern protests …
The Dilemma of an upwardly mobile, English speaking, Bengali Dalit woman
Drishadwati Bargi The rather long title could have been longer if it were to encapsulate the full range of the subjectivity of this scribe. It should have been “The dilemma of being an upwardly mobile, English speaking, Dalit Feminist and ideologue who is simultaneously a wannabe intellectual, a commodity fetishist and a person with …