For An Informed Ambedkar Age
Umar Nizar Grief manifested in ways that felt like anything but grief; grief obliterated all feelings but grief, grief made a twin wear the same shirt for days on end to preserve the morning on which the dead were still living; grief made a twin peel stars off the ceiling and lie in bed …
Umar Nizar “Where do coconut trees go When their roots are declared illegal”. -Ajmal Khan, `Mappila Verses’ Poetry as a tool of resistance has been wielded by personas ranging from the Hebraic to the Hellenic, from Moses to Kabir. Poet, sociologist and educator, Ajmal Khan in his debut collection of verse, creates a poetic/proto history …
Umar Nizar The musician AR Rahman has recently been castigated in certain circles for speaking out strongly against a lobby working against him in Bollywood. This has caught many by surprise. The huge fan following of the Academy Award-winning composer commanded has not really translated into popular support. The politics of music and the …
Umar Nizar The brutal murder of P. Jeyaraj and his son Beniks in police custody in Sathankulam in Tamil Nadu invokes the Nirbhaya case in its brutality, the only difference in this case being that the perpetrators were policemen. The atrocious and horrific nature of the torture and the brutalities inflicted upon the victims …
Umar Nizar ‘Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible’. -Janet Malcolm In the surveillance police state of the globalized contemporary world, Manu Joseph has somewhat achieved the acme of the savarna journalist and has assumed …
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 …
Umar Nizar The Journal of Extreme Anthropology recently carried a study by an Indian academic on the forced movement of millions of migrant labourers and their families across the states, and mostly into the Gangetic Delta. The domain under consideration, for too long has been infected with the caste virus. The author of the …
Umar Nizar “No, not a single letter is seen On my race So many histories are seen On so many races” –Poykayil Appachan (Tr: Ajay Sekher) English is the unacknowledged Creole of the world. Chandramohan, the Indian English poet, uses the colonial patois to craft an intergenerational dialogue with the Malayali social reformer Poykayil Appachan. …
What do they know of Kathakali, Who they only Kathakali knows? Mistaken Modernities in Kerala Umar Nizar The cultural ecosystem in southern India, has been at the forefront of heralding an Indic future, from APJ Abdul Kalam on the Veena to TM Krishna performing live at the beaches of Kerala and TN, the southern …