Neither knowing nor unknowing is good enough

By Ashwini Falnikar

I am not fit for any category – academic intellectual, Gramsci’s organic intellectual or the ‘chappal intellectual’ who roams around on college campuses in kurta-chappals with a jhola slung on her shoulder. With the hope of complete exemption, I choose not to fall into any of these categories. I do not wish to claim that I possess knowledge. For claiming that might make people want to point fingers at me for not knowing something or for knowing it.

Film review

Chapter 3: A search for the self and the other

By Pooja Das Sarkar

One need not be a chamber – to be
Haunted-
One need not be a House-
The Brain has Corridors – surpassing
Material Place -

- Emily Dickinson

Past and present, reality and dreams, narrator and listener, somewhere merge and in between lies the space of the story and its time. When soldier X1 returns from the war against the clones, he finds himself faced with an unusual problem: his identity has been stolen by his fellow soldier in war. In an Odyssey like situation, soldier X1 returns as Ulysses did from the war but unfortunately there isn’t even a pet dog to affirm his unrecognized identity. Instead, his colleague in war is now face to face with his wife in a tribunal to prove who her husband really is. Will she recognize him or will she choose the other? Who or what is reality any way? Is it a Descartian “I think therefore I am” or is it a Camusian existential crisis or a post-modern lack of coherent whole? Where does the self and subjectivity starts formulating itself and how much is it contingent on the phenomenological world outside? What about the strange corridors of the mind-the corridors where old memories fade and new memories are created and new identities too?

Srikant Agawane, the director of Chapter 3, is a minimalist.

Silent Spaces

This series of photographs by Shaira Sequeira Shetty has been shot using a digital camera.