Tag: Culture


  • Drivers in Kashmir are known for putting out some amusing lines on their cab screens and shields. While the world around them is changing fast, they still carry their pining hearts and painful couplets. In the city of seven bridges swooped by scrutiny swarm, a pensive man is finding it hard to run his survival…

  • Hanna Alkafโ€™s The Girl and the Ghost is an unapologetic Malaysian story with memorable characters, thought-provoking concepts, flawless writing and intertwining of culture. When an old witch dies, her pelesitโ€”a dark spirit or ghost (the Malay word hantu is used interchangeably for both), usually commanded by a woman, that can transform into a grasshopperโ€”is passed…

  • From the Editor: Roland Barthes, in fullย Roland Gรฉrard Barthes, (born November 12, 1915,ย Cherbourg, Franceโ€”died March 25, 1980, Paris), French essayist and social and literary critic whose writings onย semiotics, the formal study of symbols and signs pioneered byย Ferdinand de Saussure, helped establish structuralism and theย New Criticismย as leadingย intellectual movements. Barthesโ€™s literary style, which was always stimulating though…

  • Introduction It is a common argument, made both implicitly and explicitly in Islamophobic rhetoric, that Islam, on the whole, is antithetical to modern secular notions of human rights. Whether it is through the lens of the rights of women in Islam and the oppression of women in the Muslim world, or through cited components of the shariโ€™a regarding…

  • Beneath the modern metropolitan Delhi of today lie the remains of a royal Dehli which survived centuries. Rana Safvi, in her book, City of my Heart, digs up and translates some fragments of an era which could be attributed as magnanimous, more so, a golden period in the history of the Indian subcontinent. This book…

  • Trends have changed, philosophies of existence and their manifestations too have made a brutal and radical shift towards the โ€˜distortions of something-ness.โ€™ The world once had experienced Socrates, walking down from wild forest, with a swing of gestures on his face, reflecting a deep search with an endless pulse of confusions. The collective social psychology…