I just came across this poem (a friend fwded it to me) and just had to post it….such poems deserve more than just a place in my inbox….poems which speak such needed a wider platform than just a few fwds….. Here goes…. "You ask for a poem.I offer you a blade of grass. You say it is not good enough.You ask for a poem. I say this blade of grass will do. It has dressed itself in frost, It is more immediateThan any...

The name Subodh Roy conjures up nothing for most of us. And perhaps even after being told that he was involved in one of the greatest acts of rebellion against the British Raj, the blank faces would endure. And there is a reason for that as well….The Chittagong Armoury Raid and the subsequent “liberation” of Chittagong for two days and the guerilla war that followed for 3 more years (during which time large parts of...

War is an atrocity for which I find words really insufficient….but then, words, however inadequate, are all that we really have….. And then, sometimes words have an effect that no amount of news overage, no amount of visuals and no amount of passionate arguments can have….it is then we understand that words, spoken by a person gifted enough, angry enough and sensitive enough are weapons in a way no bombs can ever be….to...

As I finished the last page of Howard Zinn’s “People’s History of the United States”, I felt instantly that I wanted to read something similar but this time, on India and about India and about its people. First about the book, a book that I have been wanting to read for the last 2 years but only got hold of it a month back. The most radical aspect of Zinn’s book is how it completely circumvents the standard history...

Sometimes it takes only a snatch of a song or a few words to stop us for a few moments in our mad rush onwards….. This poem by Langston Hughes (the title of which formed the heading of a chapter in Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” ) is one such for me… Barely a paragraph, in fact just of 10 lines in all, it manages to evoke perhaps centuries of injustice and the transformation of...