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...
Abdi Latif Ega The Water Bearer The journey to the well was long and scary when Twosmo was younger. She would start before the shadows cast, and would usually reach...
Gopal Gandhi Her name responds with images. Of her. O.P. Sharma has a lovely photograph of her. A ‘late’ Kamaladevi, picture-daters would say. She is seated at a table, her hands stretched...
Anchita Ghatak Sex work continues to be a vexing issue. Abolitionists feel that prostitutes or prostituted women are victims of the worst possible kind of sexual exploitation and prostitution...
Steven Connor I draw the phrase ‘material imagination’ from Gaston Bachelard, who uses it to describe two intersecting things: firstly, the ways in which the material world is imagined, not...
Nabarun Bhattacharya UsefulUseless Colin Wilson, the philosopher (and author of The Outsider), often wondered about asking Samuel Beckett whether life was really and altogether so meaningless? But...
Manash Bhattacharjee The new Seminar issue, ‘A Country of Our Own’ (April 2012), became an interesting prospect when I saw Nauman Naqvi’s name among the contributors. I started reading his essay the...
Prasanta Chakravarty Stanley Cavell’s magisterial memoir Little Did I Know, Excerpts from Memory (Stanford University Press, 2010) begins by telling us that his will be a story of the detours on the...
Naiyar Masud Sad mauj raa ze raftan-e khud muztrib kunad Mauje keh bar-kinaar ravad az miyaan-e maa Each wave that strikes out to embrace the shore Leaves a...
Marjorie Perloff One of the most common genres in writing about academia today is the epitaph for the humanities. In a recent issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Robert Weisbuch–an English...
Anchita Ghatak Shahid Smriti is a slum in Calcutta and we – the team from Parichiti – work there with women domestic workers and adolescent girls. The idea of working with girls is to get them to...