Sreekala Sivasankaran No more insinuation No more provocation No more arguments No more slapping on the face No more pinching of the hips No more pulling of my breasts in the street No more spitting on the vagina No more forced Carols No more baptisms of captivity Put me on medicines Put me on ECT …
Karnan : A powerful cinematic projection of Dalit Assertion and Anger
Vidyasagar “He did not hit us because we vandalized the bus. No, he hit us because we stood tall. He hit me because I, Maadasamy’s son, was named Duryodanan.” ~ (Dialogue from Karnan) Karnan is a Tamil language film which was recently released on Amazon Prime. Karnan is the second movie directed by the Periyerum Perumal …
Caste and access to public spaces: A field study in Suburban Mumbai
Vanshree Vankar In India, the historical context of oppression through occupation has given birth to social stratification via caste culture which includes notions of purity and impurity. This brutal history of thousands of years of discrimination restricts the utility of public space in ways both physical and psychological. In turn, these constraints on the …
‘Perspectives’: Social Experiment or Caste Conservation?
Kanika Sori In February this year, a young Savarna woman from Srishti School of Art Design and Technology, Bangalore, created a photo-project that went viral. It was hosted by fifty different kinds of media portals. Recently it was recycled by an e-zine called Storypick for public consumption. Its creator called the album ‘Perspectives,’ and …
Down Town to Kiss of Love: Problems of ‘Public’ Reasoning
Ajith Kumar A S & K Ashraf Certain debates are constructed around the deceptive dialectics of progressive versus retrograde. The scheme of either/or motivates us to fall in line on the point of saying either an unequivocal yes or a categorical no. Fissures in the society and politics are sometimes rendered invisible through such …
Warning: Ayyankali Ahead!
Ajith Kumar A S At Vellayambalam junction in Trivandrum, Ayyankali stands in the centre. We have to circle the Ayyankali square to get to our destinations. The heavy traffic in the junction may not help us to take a passing glance at the statue most of the time. But our politics would. That could never …
Why Beef and Pork Food Festival at JNU?
The New Materialists Comrades, we have recently seen the Janmastami celebrations in JNU by right wing and casteist forces i.e. ABVP and NSUI in many places of JNU. Celebration of the Hindu festivals (in the name of celebrating Culture) is the act of enhancing and strengthening the caste system. Krishna, the god of Hindus who …
Who Owns The “Country”?
Ajith Kumar A S While having tea at local tea shops around Trivandrum city I have seen lot of workers, may be from Bengal, Orissa or Bihar. They (A problem- No other terms to use other than “they”) would be very active having tea, snacks, talking to each other, talking to the shopkeeper, laughing, talking …