Prophet’s Childhood: Majidi’s Take the Talk of Tinseltown
The cinema world is waiting with bated breath to see MajidMajidi’s take on the Prophet Muhammad’s eventful life. The film had hogged limelight mainly for two reasons: first, the focus of his film is on the Prophet’s childhood; so it would be the first attempt to bring the childhood of the Prophet on screen. Also, […]
‘Guantanamo Diary’: An Account of Justice Detained
Casualties in the wake of war on terror and blind apprehensions in the name of detaining ‘terrorists’ have started to come out in the form of first person narratives. What makes Mohammsdou Ould Slahi’s Guantanamo Diary stand out from similar titles like My Guantanamo Diary: The Detainees and the Stories They Told Me (2008) is […]
The Colonial Lineage of Charlie Hebdo
In the 1995 neo-noir ‘The Usual Suspects‘, Kevin Spacey, playing the role of a con-man affected by cerebral palsy, rephrases Charles Baudelaire in a memorable one-liner: “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” This line can be seen overtly rephrased again and again ever since 9/11 and is […]
The Caste History of Ghar Wapasi
Today there are a lot of debates and analyses on Ghar Wapasi and Love Jihad in the media. It is to be noted in this context that these are social phenomena that can be traced back to the late 19th century. It was around this time that the Brahmins and savarnas, who had stood along […]
I Am Not Charlie Hebdo
The journalists at Charlie Hebdo are now rightly being celebrated as martyrs on behalf of freedom of expression, but let’s face it: If they had tried to publish their satirical newspaper on any American university campus over the last two decades it wouldn’t have lasted 30 seconds. Student and faculty groups would have accused them […]
The legacy of Kufa
A’lamuKufa, (Masters of Kufa), an encyclopedic work by Iraqi historian Sayyid Mudar Al Hulw, covers a long sweep of history from the early seventh century, when the city became a bustling encampment town under the sway of the burgeoning Islamic Caliphate to its more recent history under the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century […]
Ghar Wapsi and the Need for a Principled Resistance
“One sordid motive violates the whole preaching. It is like a drop of poison, which fouls the whole food. Therefore, I should do without any preaching at all. A rose does not need to preach. It simply spreads its fragrance. The fragrance is its own sermon …The fragrance of religious and spiritual life is much […]
Of Mortality and the Limits of Medicine
We are struggling to cope with the constraints of our biology, with the limits set by genes and cells, flesh and bones. Medical science has remarkable power to push against these limits. But still, its power is finite. Medicine can improve our life and it has done a lot of things in life; it reduced […]
Life of ‘the Poet Laureate of Asia’
Allama Mohamed Iqbal, one of Indian subcontinent’s most versatile and controversial figures in the 20th century, defies easy categorizations. The myriad ironies and contradictions that defined colonial India converged in the life and works of Iqbal to such an extent that the exact opposite of anything ever said of him could equally be true! A […]
Connect
Connect with us on the following social media platforms.