Where are you heading to, Soumitrababu?

If you still read a Bengali daily, you may have already seen a variation of this image on the first page: Soumitra Chatterjee, the veteran thespian taking Bangabibhusan (a silly award introduced by the Mamata Government) from the chief minister. Given the circumstances when most Bengali intellectuals and artists are gradually gravitating to the powers-that-be, it is apparently another instance of a sellout. But since it involves Soumitra Chatterjee, who is widely respected for his leftist values and cultural views, we can't help raise our eyebrows in shock.

The Real World is emerging now

It's a real relief that globalization is out, and while what replaces this is nothing better, we can now at least see the world in its true and actual form. 

Just think how the world was transformed by globalization. The proponents of the late capitalism went all out to change the narrative of our life. You were not allowed to talk anything in negative terms. You had to pretend you were happy. You had always to hide your actual woes and torments and show up everywhere with plastic smile and delight.

It's a relief to see that reality shows are on their way out.

It's a relief to see that people are once again protesting en mass against the powers-that-be.

It's relief to see that many writers, especially in US, are wielding their pen against the atrocities of those in power.

It's a relief to see that the media- at least a part of it - is now going back to play the role of what it is supposed to play. 

It's really relief to see that the world is bouncing back to its real and familiar shape despite Donald Trump.

Martin Amis on Donald Tromp

As a lover of America (and as an admirer of the planet), I offer this advice: Don’t shrug. Don’t stand by and let President Trump be President Trump.

Russia abandoned socialism right under Lenin and Trotsky!

I would place the abandonment of socialism much earlier, under Lenin and Trotsky, at least if socialism is understood to mean at a minimum control by working people over production. The seeds of Stalinism were present in the early Bolshevik years, partly attributable to the exigencies of the civil war and foreign invasion, partly to Leninist ideology. Under Stalin it became a monstrosity.
- Noam Chomsky

Made-of-Literature Writer

I'm made of literature and nothing else.
-Franz Kafka

Fear is my fuel: Steven Spielberg

Fear is my fuel. I get to the brink of not really knowing what to do and that’s when I get my best ideas. Confidence is my enemy and it always has been.

It's politics, stupid!

A part of it is fear, another part of it is ignorance, and another part of it is most people think they are powerless. They ask, “What can we do?” They don’t believe how much power they have. They have a lot. And between being selfish and having fear, most of the people give up. It doesn’t mean that they don’t have any interest in following politics.. They follow politics because they have to follow. It’s impacting their life.

Fariba Hachtroudi

Is the game up for Mamata Banerjee and TMC?

The Assembly election this time gives me back a whole lot of fun and faith. Who had ever thought that the central forces and the state police would actively help conduct a free and fair election? But this has thrown Ms Mamata Banerjee in a fit of rage and has her threatening her own police.

One more phase remains to the election. It's to be held on the 5th. 25 seats. The election commission is deploying thirty two thousand forces for this phase. And the police seem determined to play it out the way it did in earlier phases.

Is the game up for Ms Banerjee and TMC?

A political star is born

“We don’t want freedom from India, my brothers, we want freedom in India.”

Recommended reading: I'm a freelance writer. I refuse to work for free

I'm a freelance writer. I refuse to work for free.

Salman Rushdie on Internet

"The Internet is not a place for information, but a place for trolling, paranoia and ranting. With the shrinking of the newspaper industry, correspondents are being replaced by more and more opinion columnists, substituting truth for truthiness."

--Salman Rushdie

Absolve Kanhaiya Kumar of charge of sedition or charge me with sedition, says Harsh Mander

"It either absolves Kanhaiya Kumar of all charges of sedition. Or, if it persists in its belief that he committed the crime of sedition, then it must charge me also with criminal sedition, and arrest me, and subject me to the same investigation to which Kanhaiya Kumar is being subjected. This is because I have, in writing, taken similar positions on the issues for which his conduct is criminalised."

Why don't people understand what's happening?

 In a society of isolated people where each person is alone with his Fox News and iPhone people don’t understand what is happening. It is happening here in this fashion and it is happening in Europe in other ways, but I think these phenomena are very real.

--Noam Chomsky

Markandey Katju bids goodbye to Facebook

"I am a man of 70 and have very few years more to live.

I tried to pass on all my knowledge I acquired in my life to you, so that you may benefit. This knowledge I acquired from my gurus, before whom I stood with folded hands for decades before they gave me that knowledge. But what did I get in return? I got mostly abuses from most of you, because most of you are stupid and arrogant, and have no desire to learn.

I am sorry I even tried to teach you. So, goodbye.?"

via

History's quantum effect on people

"I’m interested in how history has this spooky quantum effect on people. How history, even when we run from it, even when we disavow it, even when we forget it, is like some very strange dark-eyed dog. It always finds its way back to us.  Not to say that this is the way the world works, but it’s what brings me to the page."

Nayantara Sahgal lambasts the fundamentalists at Hyderabad Literary Festival

"One way of raising our voices against this threat is by holding festivals of literature like this one, where writers and readers and critics can get together to discuss and debate, and agree or disagree. This way, we give public notice of the fact that writers will go on writing the stories they want to write, publishers will go on publishing them, readers will read what they wish to read, and that none of us will toe the line of those who want to make rules about how we should think, or live, or worship, and they certainly cannot tell us what we should or should not eat."

Recommended Reading: The Secret to My Productivity, or:Thughts about Luxuray and Privilege

A great deal of my work life has been unstructured and undisciplined (though not without vision and purpose). It’s just that I’ve been able to spend nearly 20 years focusing on my work to the exclusion of nearly all else. How many other people have that luxury?

Release Palestinian Poet #Ashraf Fayadh!

Soudi Court sentences Asraf Fayadh to death for his poems

Read Asraf's poems here, and see for yourself if he deserves this punishment for what he has written. and please sign the petition if you think it's a gross injustice to a poet who believes in artists' freedom.

Chorus of voices rises against "Intolerance"

"Today, we live in a country in which, when the thugs and apparatchiks of the New Order talk of “illegal slaughter”, they mean the imaginary cow that was killed — not the real man who was murdered. When they talk of taking “evidence for forensic examination” from the scene of the crime, they mean the food in the fridge, not the body of the lynched man. We say we have “progressed”, but when Dalits are butchered and their children burned alive, which writer today can freely say, like Babasaheb Ambedkar once did, that “to the untouchables, Hinduism is a veritable chamber of horrors”, without getting attacked, lynched, shot or jailed? Which writer can write what Saadat Hasan Manto wrote in his “Letters to Uncle Sam”? It doesn’t matter whether we agree or disagree with what is being said. If we do not have the right to speak freely, we will turn into a society that suffers from intellectual malnutrition, a nation of fools. Across the subcontinent it has become a race to the bottom — one that the New India has enthusiastically joined. Here too now, censorship has been outsourced to the mob."

Is social media real?

"Social media isn't real. It's a system based on social approval, likes, validation in views, success in followers."
--Essena O'Neil