I AND MY WORDS

Sanjay Gandhi and Indira Gandhi (Source: The Print) On 25 June 1975, India saw the extension of the external emergency, imposed since 1965 into the domestic affairs of India. More than 25 years have passed; yet, the public memory of the Emergency is conspicuous by its absence. It is as if this event, the darkest episode in the memory of India since its long colonial slavery, never happened. There have been no protests by so called liberals against the event. Our youth have no inkling on the events of that horrid night and the subsequent two years of dissent crushing of the worst possible magnitude. The amnesia of this country’s conscience is troublesome to say the least. Few accounts exist of what had transpired apart from the odd memorial of journalists – it is pathetic to note how our so called doyens of media of the time were hand in glove with the establishment of the time. Lal Krishna Advani’s adage - You were asked only to bend, but you crawled – was a tight slap on ...

While We Bribed Officials for a Scooter, Some People Just Called to get Cars (Image Courtesy: Rediff.com) Yes, even I studied as a ‘Patelian’ back in the day, with the Khan Market in vicinity. And no, I am not part of the OG Khan Market Gang that Sowmya Lakhani so proudly belongs to . The problem with her limited periphery of sight, blinkered by holier than thou attitude, symbolizes all that is wrong with the Khan Market gang. What is this Khan Market gang, one may ask. Let me tell you, being a peripheral player, what it means. Schools like Columba’s, Modern and Sardar Patel were for the longest time populated by the children of New Delhi elite, who actually had extremely privileged lives, and access to several things that people like us living on the periphery of the city did not get. Children in this school are divided by class consciousness of an acute kind, with groups living in bubbles –many of these children faced first world problems, with the others just looking on, some...

Image Courtesy: The Wire Public memory is a strange beast. It takes little by way of throttling to erase it easily – restrict the discussion to intellectualism, or ensure a public amnesia about events by erasing the picture and its contents. However, memories of individuals fail to be erased. Truth can compete with official versions and public amnesia, but to what extent? When there is hardly anyone to do anything beyond reproducing the same arguments over and over again, even the proponent, the sufferer of the story is loathe to talk about it. After all, what does one achieve by scratching old wounds repeatedly except pain? Marichjhapi is an island in the Sundarbans, and little beyond it is remembered to this day. Any talk of it is merely talk today – absolutely nothing has been done about it to this day. While the Sundarbans is an interesting cultural complexity to study, the island of Marichjhapi hides in its womb the horrific memory of the massacre that took place in 1979. While...

Credit: India Today The narrative battle has been lost by the privileged few. That is the message that India's elections show as the results pour in. The power of communicating directly with the people, filtering out power brokers, media barons and crony capitalists has shown that Narendra Modi and his team not only understand the power of communication, they also read the pulse of the people extremely well, barring a few blips that came here and there. Most people still read the moorings of Modi wrongly. He's not a leader that has been parachuted after stints in foreign lands in anonymity. Here is rather a man who has traveled in ignominy across the length and breadth of this country in trying conditions, exploring its various facets and built a connect with the pulse of this nation. He's positioned himself, and perhaps rightly, as the voice of a civilization that has long been asleep, and has started to stir in its awakening, uttering its first words like the war...

Listen to Confusion about Hindu polity by HoldsASharpPen on #SoundCloud https://soundcloud.com/holds-a-sharp-pen/confusion-about-hindu-polity

Catch me now on SoundCloud as well. I put up my thoughts today on election trends and weigh in my thoughts. Listen to Friday Election Musings by HoldsASharpPen #np on #SoundCloud https://soundcloud.com/holds-a-sharp-pen/friday-election-musings

Some time back, I was sitting in a posh, upscale restaurant in South Delhi, when I noted that one of India’s leading ‘intellectuals’, Arundhati Roy, had stepped in with a friend, and ordered perhaps one of the priciest things on the restaurant’s menu. It was quite interesting to note that she did not step out even once, given her bleeding heart for the poor and disadvantaged of India, to even share a part of that meal with a slew of beggars that walked around the market, let alone invite one of them to dine with her and her friend. Her friend too was evidently one of those white people tasked with searching poverty and atrocity stories in India – it was, as they say in the ‘cowbelt’ of India, a truly Ram Milayi Jodi.  Cut to a few months back. I was dining, thanks to familiar people, with the head of one of India’s premier think tanks. All I heard was that Modi had destroyed India’s inclusive fabric, and the grave tone adopted by him and his wife seemed to suggest that lynch mob...