Tag: free speech
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Speaking Volumes: Into the abyss
One of the few joys of researching blasphemy, a crime with increasingly bleak consequences for those found guilty of it, is that it’s a fine excuse for watching a Satanist rocker for a Polish death metal band spin his hair expertly as he belts out the lyrics to ‘Christians To The Lions’. In September 2007, […]
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How India’s writers are fighting intolerance
In the BBC, 13th October 2015: “A month-and-a-half later, the murder of this scholar has set off an unusual movement with little precedent. Writers from across the country are standing up in protest against the Sahitya Akademi, a literary body that represents 22 of India’s languages, and the state. ‘Suppression and violence’ On 12 September, […]
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Murder, and a revolt in the Akademi
(On the morning of August 30, 2015, the scholar and former Karnataka University vice-chancellor MM Kalburgi was murdered in his home in Dharwad; he had opened the door to his assailants; his family heard gunshots and found him dead. He had received death threats in 2014 and 2015 over comments he had made at a […]
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Speaking Volumes: Unequal Murders
“Those who killed, killed in the open. Thugs committed their thuggery in the public eye, with a spring in their step. .. A dark, frightening cloud of reality had descended, one that no one had expected.” Uday Prakash, ‘Mangosil’, The Walls of Delhi In the 1980s, Kulbir Natt and other journalists chronicled the period in […]
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“Please leave him alone”: reading Perumal Murugan
“Perhaps the only free space we have any more, until these times change, is here, in the private compact between writers and their readers that takes place in the wide, broad-bordered lands inside our own heads. In this land, the offence-takers and the angry protestors have no valid visas and cannot cross the frontiers.”
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From France to India, Charlie Hebdo and the promise of free speech
Wrote this in some sadness for the Huffington Post. It was published on January 10, a few days after the murders of the editorial team and others, including bodyguards and police officers, at Charlie Hebdo in Paris. “Responsibility cuts both ways. It is true that you cannot reason with a fundamentalist, of any religion, that […]
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(Published in the Business Standard, April 30, 2014) In the great city of Varanasi, there lived a weaver of threads and words, who sent out his poems like incendiary drones into the comfortable world of the Kazis and the Brahmins, neither of whom had much liking for Kabir. The weaver’s verses preached the love of […]
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Speaking Volumes: The Cosmos Evolution
(Published in the Business Standard, March 31, 2014) One of my favourite Carl Sagan moments came during a radio show years ago, where the scientist addressed the questions put to him by a creationist. He answered the first question on evolution; his interlocutor did not acknowledge his answer, moving on to the next question on […]
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An open letter to S Anand
From The Hindu: The Delhi-based publisher Navayana has decided to cancel the agreement for release of the English translation of Mr. D’Cruz’s first Tamil novel Aazhi Soozh Ulagu (Ocean Ringed World) in the wake of his recent political stand on Mr. Modi. An open letter to S Anand and Navayana Dear Anand, Somewhere along […]
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Speaking Volumes: Countries of the Blind
(Published on Tuesday, 29 January, 2013; over the next few days, censorship was back in the news, with both Viswaroopam and Salman Rushdie at the receiving end of various kinds of bans.) Afghanistan is one of the last bastions of the exotic left to writers. It can be written about from a great and sentimental […]
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