THE INDIAN COMMENTATOR

Image Courtesy: Google Most of the literary festivals around the word are supposed to offer the following things: Books, stories, poems, words, and the wonderful chance of meeting the people who write them. Literature festivals never talk politics or race or casteism or gender. Exposing certain breeds of cultural tyrants is not deemed to be the purpose of Jaipur Literature Fest; at least, I think so. Who in the world would buy what I just said about literary fests? At least I won’t. In this paradoxical idealism, I can see the traces of myself being negated and asserted and negated again. Literature festivals do talk politics, race, caste and gender. This later thought is the reality and the former, naïve idealism. One can see in this case, reality creates wounds while naivety heals them. After previous year’s fray by the Islamists and Hinduists, I was doubtful if there would be another JaipurLiterature Fest in the coming year, meaning 2013. I was so...

Image Courtesy: Google The routine drama of daily life is mostly structured like this: Getting up in the morning, morning chores, breakfast, getting the daily bus to work, forgetting to put the signature in the attendance column, screeching at the maximum voice to students who hardly believe in the prospect of listening to another young person who boast of being a teacher, having the same tiffin for lunch, dozing off in the afternoon light-hours, taking the same bus back home, thinking about the benefits of exercise and regretting over not getting enough time for workouts. Image Courtesy: Google In an attempt to make a difference, I started a new habit lately: buying news papers every morning at the news stand, where I get the bus to college too, inside the old bus stand. I always held the argument that news papers in Kerala never learnt how to balance news from different areas. Most of them have a surplus political content. In one of the confer...

Image Courtesy: Google This article is especially for those who belong to the world of art, writing in specific. At least you should have an idea of how books are created and what magnitude of labour goes into the production of them. If you are unable to connect with it, please clickhere . Beauty is inexplicable and it serves better if one leaves it to be so. But often we encounter trends that might suggest a different truth. From movies to fashion, from literature to social activism, there exist patterns to which each individual belonging to these activities tries to cling to. Or else, doom might befall them. It is truth. This can be illustrated with some simple examples. If one needs to look beautiful, and wears mud on one’s face, that would not guarantee admiration, but quite the opposite. This is true with movies or writing too. In politics too one finds no different story. In politics, we have all been granted unusual amounts of rants and promises o...

The Bunyan Tree, Butterfly and the Traveler Image Courtesy: Google When he was in the land of Indus , Alfadur lived inside a banyan tree in the form of a small butterfly. He never went searching for flowers and never wandered the land and glided on the breeze like ordinary butterflies. His only companion was the tree, the wide, vast and ancient banyan tree. The banyan tree was near the holy river of the Hindus, where the river met the sea of the Arabs. The wooded area surrounding the tree hid it from the eyes of the world. Days and nights, Alfadur slept inside a small cavern in the tree, until one day, when he woke up and took human form. He became a naked woman and started walking around the tree with her gaze fixed upon the ground, as if in search for something. Before long, the neighbouring bushes and thorns shook and from the figs that lay on the floor came a crushing sound. A young man emerged from the bushes. His name was Aamod. He too was intently searching f...

Rape is to force someone to have sex when they are unwilling, using violence or threatening behaviour . This is the definition, upon which the law of morality and judiciary works, not the Indian politicians, not the media guys, not the intellectuals. I pained to see the recent developments surrounding a rape happened in Delhi . The victim has lost her struggle to get back to life. She failed in what we can call an instinct all of us will have when we are brutally chased to death—the struggle to exist. In the sane social life, it is better to die than living a life of shame, but when it comes to real life, we all will struggle for our life. When a fellow being is struggling hard to hold on to life, what our fellow human beings need to do? Image Courtesy: Sarath Krishnan Image Courtesy: Sarath Krishnan The following are the lines of argument made by Arundhati Roy and some Dalit activists, or so I have understood them (http://www.reporteronlive.com/story/5897/index...

“The world is nothing but a bunch of thin lines separating what we think as extremes.” (236) Harlan Coben; Caught . Courtesy: Penguingroup.com Caught is a novel that begins with a surprising twist in the destiny of a social worker. This opening part introduces another major character, a reporter. However, even after the twists in the beginning that could very well remind the readers that much would be coming in the following section of the book (and that is guaranteed), the rest of the novel, until the ending part, remains rather bleak for a thriller. In the case of some books, all is well that ends well.  The novel ends with three words; “I forgive you.” This sentence reflects happiness and contentment, a perfect way to end the book. The language of the book though, is not literary and is matter-of-fact. This could be substantial in creating a specific voice for the novel. Coben’s language has its influence upon readers undeniably; it takes the readers into its flow and ...

Pain never takes vacation. Here is another news of girl-missing. There is no telling what I feel or what any of them who are close to this girl feels. I do not think this is a time when we can think about sorrow and pain. This is time to act, to find them, all those missing from their homes, their families, and beloved ones. Image Courtesy: Facebook This is yet another instance of how social media can be of great help. I received this picture from Facebook. Here it is. My review of Harlan Coben’s novel Caught comes next!  The waiting is over. The year 2012 came to a close and the next started off. There may be people who celebrated this shift, this change of speculative time. I am not one among them. I could not, and shall not. I felt hollow within myself. It seems my mind is just reflecting the intellectual and psychic vacuum of my nation , where any one can get raped and killed on open and justice is just a cliché. Courtesy: Google Images RIP Delhi girl . ...

This is a recent case of girl child missing , from Star City , West Virginia , the  United States . This picture says it all. I uploaded it from my Facebook page. I spotted this picture shared on one of my friend’s wall. I shared it on to my Facebook timeline from there, thinking it would be helpful for some aching hearts to find out where their only panacea, their lovely daughter, is. Image Courtesy: Google This picture has been added on this blog, to create more chances of finding Skylar Neese . And to let the family know people do care about them, even if they are miles away, on the other part of the world. The news and search of Skylar Neese’s disappearance reminded me of a book I read about three months back: Harlan Coben’s novel Caught . I had announced a book review before two months on this book. Due to some reasons this review could not be posted until now. However, with this post my intention is to renew that promise and to let you know that the r...

Image courtesy: Google Teaching English at a local college provides me the necessary income for survival, since my books have not started their earning journey into the wide and wondrous world, yet. Still, I must say, teaching provides me not just money, but the experience as a person undertaking a professional responsibility. This experience amalgamates the innate creative impulses into a literary text exhibiting order, alignment, pattern and style, elements that are much needed in any writer’s success journey.   Even if I hadn’t taken this job up, I would have learnt these elements, but perhaps in the hard way, who knows. Doing any other job, while pursuing a writer’s life, can bring to the surface a similar set of experiences that at a second stage, can culminate into a writing genius. I hope the story I am going to tell here, might influence, inspire and help move forward many like myself, who at some unfortunate turn in their lives, are forced to believe they are ...

Image Courtesy: Google Wayanad is the third in the column of fourteen districts that form the state of Kerala, located between Calicut and Western Ghats , if counted from North. Wayanad is famous for its coffee beans, paddy fields, tea estates, the hills, forest, valleys and streams. Wayanad is notorious for farmer suicides, as well. There had been another diabolic issue, for the past one month that the district was notoriously conspicuous in the news media for—a tiger. On the second of December 2012, the Forest Guardians shot it dead. Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry? There is a story behind it. It had been one month; the news of a tiger roaming free in the residential areas in Wayanad had been celebrated and anticipated along with each morning’s cozy tea in each household outside Wayanad, throughout Kerala. There was nothing literally sarcastic about the celebration of this new...

“That is why its name was called Babel , because there Jehovah had confused the language of all the earth, and Jehovah had scattered them from there over all the surface of the earth.”—Genesis 11:9 Image Courtesy: Google This is one of the most puzzling of questions. Some of you might have thought of it as a brain twister, just a labyrinth of infinite contemplation with no definite answers. To a certain extent you are right in thinking so. The reason to say this will follow and we will learn it, perhaps, at the end of this passage. In significant books such as the Holy Bible , there are spots where history, science, philosophy, religion, spirituality, and psychology all merge to create a single event. One such moment is when Jehovah God said, “Look! They are one people and there is one language for them all, and this is what they start to do.” [Genesis 11:6] God said it looking at how the  descendants  of Noah, who settled in the plain valley in the land of Shina...