Across South Asia, the difference between prejudice and collapse is not the existence of hate. Every society has it in varying shades. The difference is whether the majoritarian state internalizes hate against the ‘other’, whether FIRs get diluted, trials get delayed, mobs get garlanded and impunity driven violence against minorities becomes low-cost. When that happens, the poison is not outside the system. It becomes the system.
And perhaps this is precisely what many readers, particularly South Asian readers navigating fractured contemporary lives, have been missing without fully realising it: fiction willing to slow down long enough to notice the fragile, passing intimacies through which people continue surviving one another.
Thurman said that Tibet was not an individual nation-state question but something that goes far beyond that. “It is not about a people yearning for freedom from an invading state. It is about a very valuable society struggling to keep its centuries-old tradition of intellectual evolution alive.” He said that while he was hopeful that the problem would be resolved soon, “and during His Holiness’ lifetime,” it was hard to put a timeframe to it.
The perceived push from a political leadership that has roots in Gujarat, the split in the locally rooted Shiv Sena that was engineered, the resentment it brewed among ordinary citizens and the history of Maharashtra -- which was born on May 1, 1960 after a bitter struggle that split the erstwhile Bombay State into two distinct linguistic states of Maharashtra and Gujarat -- are all complex and contributory factors to the evolving political unrest in middle-class Mumbai.
If you have ever felt the dopamine rush from a like or comment, or have scrolled past your bedtime, you are one of the millions entrenched in this system. According to recent studies, the average person spends two hours and 24 minutes on social media daily. Each interaction—whether it’s a curated ad, a filtered photo, or even a friend’s post becomes material that subtly shapes how we see ourselves and the world around us.
So, what is the smell of autumn about? Is it the change in weather, from an otherwise hot tropical condition or is it the festivals, the food, the lights and the colours? What is it that really makes this feeling so special? Perhaps it is a realisation of moments of loss and happiness and a sense of comfort - all strung across the same thread
Our daughter, Ileana Ann, was born in Dubai. However, now, at two years old. She’s being taught to know the anthem of India better than “Dil Dil Pakistan”. Just beginning to string together words, tottering between rooms with a giggle that sounds the same in any language. Born with a passport that bears the tricolor — yet half her heartbeat echoes from across the Wagah border.
Over the decades since the 1950s many Indian Armed Forces band masters composed numbers based on Indian folk music sourced from different parts of the country. After almost five decades, there has been slow phase-out of Western tunes and more works by Indian composers, many of whom are from within the armed forces themselves.
We are aware that the change in information is proportional to the total accumulative existing knowledge on a particular subject and hence this leads to its exponential growth. Yet no matter how much the processing power of AI is, it will still remain bound by the existing knowledge and the environment which produced it.
Together, these voices converged on common ground: universal education, ecological cooperation, equitable trade, soft borders, and a revitalised SAARC that works for people rather than politics. Or, as one participant Ayesha Ahmed Quadri from India put it: “In the hands of South Asia lie the seeds of unity, compassion, peace, humility, and growth, ready to blossom beyond borders and history.”
The poetry, essays, and the audio-visual montage accompanying Sarwar’s reading in California Plaza sought to bear witness to the long-term consequences of Radcliffe’s disinterested cartography. Nearly 80 years later, the India-Pakistan border still crackles with tension. Wars, cross-border strikes, and conflicts continue to scratch the scabs of Partition.
This effort is especially moving, considering the magnitude of lives lost in the Kargil conflict. In the 77-day Operation Vijay, India lost 527 soldiers—more than the casualties in the 14-month-long 1947–48 Jammu & Kashmir war, the 23-day Indo-Pak war of 1965, or even the 13-day 1971 war that led to the liberation of Bangladesh.
While a deep and brooding darkness engulfed Guru Dutt in the last few years of his life, a glowing light is now being focused on his amazing body of work – from Baazi (1951) to Baharen Phir Bhi yengi which was incomplete when the filmmaker died and was completed by his team and released in 1966.
Political parties, of course, have their numerical calculations in place, making ground-level behavioural changes irrelevant. Even in the past, it rarely mattered. Vote-bank politics continues to dominate, leaving the bhadralok—Bengal’s genteel middle class—in a quiet, uneasy dilemma.
Salilda was 27 when he achieved this break in 1952-53. Till his last day he never looked back. He composed music in 143 films, 75 of them in Hindi, 41 in Bengali and 27 in Malayalam. Besides, he composed music in 13 languages. He was adept at playing flute, piano, esraj and harmonium.
'The myriad stories one has heard about Indians and Pakistanis opening their homes and hearts to strangers from the other side seemed to belong to another age. One has heard many anecdotes of strangers being invited for meals into homes and not being charged for goods and services. For me, the number of such experiences was zero.’
The most celebrated films in the Dutt oeuvre - Pyaasa (1957) and Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959), explored themes of unfulfilled love, societal alienation and the struggles of the human spirit, making him the unsung poet of Indian cinema. TIME magazine included Pyaasa in its ‘100 Best Films of All Time’
Thus, to produce happy and productive dreams one needs to be active mentally and physically during waking hours. Whatever memories we make during daytime are reflected in our dreams, including prophetic dreams. Probably solution dreams of great inventors also came because of the very active prepared mind during waking hours.
Shireen Huq, chair of the reform commission and founder of Naripokkho, said, “We had an uprising, a regime change, but the culture of misogyny, the brutalisation of women, and the public assertion of male dominance, all remain intact and hegemonic.”
