Humanities Underground

The Child is Given Over to a Stepmother

Prasanta Chakravarty Unappeasable and plain. That is the reason Simone Weil is able to unburden and pull us deeper into relentless entanglements and by doing so, sets us free. “The woman who wishes...

Adda at Barda’s Shop

Amitranjan Basu When I stood at the main gate of National Library and looked ahead, I got a jolt! Where did Barda’s shop go? I crossed the road and came near the gate of the Zoo and discovered that...

Justice in a Landscape of Trees

Rajarshi Dasgupta Homeward Bound How does a call for justice appear? When is such a call thought justified? Standing at the crossroads of 1947, as colonial rule came to end in south Asia, the Indian...

The Foreboding of Autumn: Aamir Bashir’s Harud

Akhil Katyal Director: Aamir Bashir Cast: Reza Naji, Shanawaz Bhat, Shamim Basharat, Salma Ashai If you work with silence as your frame, every sound gets registered. If you work with scarcity as your...

Abstract, Abstraction

Swapan Chakravorty The primary problem with the adjective ‘abstract’ stems from its etymology. It derives from the Latin ab, meaning ‘from’, and trahere, ‘drawn away’. In other words, it carries a...

Laziness & Work: An Interview with Pierre Saint-Amand

Sina Najafi and Pierre Saint-Amand Jean-Siméon Chardin, Auguste-Gabriel Godefroy Watching a Top Spin, 1738. The roots of our contemporary obsession with work and productivity are usually traced to the...

Books on the Footpath

Kala-Pyacha Though I am yet to witness writers begging on the footpath, their books have long made their way there and have thus been silently facilitating their own journey there at some future...

The Humanities in Ferment: Strategizing for our Times, August 16-18,

The Humanities in Ferment: Strategizing for our Times  An International Conference organized by MargHumanities as part of its Global Humanities Initiative, in collaboration with the Nehru Memorial...

Explaining Neo-Malthusianism?

Mohan Rao Introduction Politically correct, influential people in policy making circles in the First World do not, any more, talk of the yellow peril, or use phrases such as population explosion, or...

Good Reasons (HUG Fiction)

Anil Menon Imaginative resistance. I’d heard the chilly phrase for the first time, just a short while ago, in one of New York Public library’s cavernous lecture rooms. Yet it already feels...

Civil War in Jefferson Country: Lessons from the University of

Brinda Bose A rain-drizzled, splendidly-verdant, sleepily-calm campus it was, just about a month ago, at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, USA – so much so that many of its residents...