Somnath Mukherji

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Published in August issue of Agenda.

http://infochangeindia.org/Agenda/On-the-move/Partitions-of-the-mind.html

Her long hair hits the ground like a lash as she sits on the floor, gyrating her small torso. Dressed in a white sari bordered in red with a big vermillion bindi on her forehead, Monu Kishko looks as if she is in a trance. A single Santhali mother, she is playing the role of a roja (witch-doctor) in a play focussing on adult literacy and primary health concerns of the villagers.

Some children and their mothers are sitting under the straw roof that extends outwards from Monu’s house, while the men are sitting on their haunches on the mud road that runs by the side. Under a starlit sky, a group of villagers are enacting a play called Andhokarer Alo (light in darkness). The children laugh in glee as a blind-and-hunchback duo approach the roja with a drunken friend who has contracted tuberculosis.

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Published in The Telegraph, Calcutta, 24th June, 2008

As elsewhere in this deltaic area, the environment has suffered on the island of Jater Deep, but so have the human inhabitants.

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Published in the March issue of Himal Southasian

The Bengali urban middle class is enmeshed in a battle within itself: one side is excited by the possibilities of betterment from the new urban vision, while the other is finding psychological defence in an imagined antiquity. This battle finds particular expression in the home. 

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Published in the January issue of Himal Southasian

I visited some villages in northern Karnataka where Samaj Parivartan Samuday (SPS), works. Here is the report based on my visit on 26th and 27th of Sept. 2007

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प्राय बीस वषॅ हो गये मुझे हाई स्कूल से उत्तीणॅ हुए।

निबंध पढने के लिए यहाँ क्लिक करें..>>

k r ranjith

Is it just this year, or have all the transitions from spring into summer been like this? In recent weeks, the gathering dark clouds on the horizon, the whiffs of cool air and distant rumblings have provided me sudden seclusion from my immediate surroundings. They have also transported me to a world that is both familiar and distant. It is odd what a little moisture in the air can do for one’s grip on the present.

Indeed, monsoon is a state of mind. Even casually thinking of monsoon brings back a flood of memories, sights, sounds, smells and feelings – as though a Himalayan river has burst its banks. Till 10th grade I lived in Arunachal Pradesh, one of India’s most sparsely populated states. I do not have a seasonally sequential memory of the monsoons there, mostly due to the fact that seasons in Arunachal did not matter. Memories of life there are like a painted story: bright smears of games, friends, a pet dog named Marshall, fishing, school, belonging to a community, lush forests, mountains with patches of jhum agriculture, affection and security. Click here to read more…>>

Published in the June 2007 issue of Himal Southasian

From the [East India] company-raj to British-raj, through license-raj to the present-raj, how close have the people of India come to the realisation of a true Swaraj? Click here to read more …>>

It is the case of a state against the nation: a nation of people that get in the way of progress and development; a nation of illiterate, ill-fed, ill-clad people springing up from within this amorphous glob called the masses. How could these people represent civil-society? Are they not engaged in their struggles of daily subsistence? Surely they have not read Marx, Weber, Foucault or the tomes on developmental economics. How then could they decide what is good for them, let alone what is good for the society? 

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The release of a summary of findings by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in early February has created flutter around the world – it is as if the findings somehow actualised and legitimised the phenomenon of global climate change. Concerned personalities and organisations have filled newspaper columns in the western media expressing their concerns and distributing the blame across the entire humanity. Click here to read more…>> 

Published in Countercurrents.org (13th March, 2007)

Link to the article in Countercurrents