Meltdown

The year was 2006-7 and twitter appeared on the tech horizon and through tech-savvy people, the news reached my ears. Users and audience for twitter was about to emerge. Gurcharan Das  extolled the virtues of brevity and instantaneous reach of twitter, in an unpaid promo in a mainstream newspaper column. This ‘liking’ and new found love for 140 characters was contagious. A pending invite was lying in my mail and one evening I clicked join. Before and a few years after Indian sports-star and celebrities joined( suspect they were paid to do so) there was not much to see on the timeline of twitter; one could scroll through all the content from India posted over weeks in less than 3 minutes. Facebook was growing in bursts and at times exponentially and yes WhatsApp came a few years after. To the young readers this may sound as tinged with nostalgia and less to do with how things were back then. Those were the days of SMS packs and Blackberry( Imported IPhone needed a fix to work). Pe...

History is an enterprise, to deny the dead their own stories. Obviously, it is an exercise; we are supposed to believe to ‘recover’ their story and life-worlds. The scientific fact of their ‘death’ is a problematic historians must overcome somehow. This is supposed to be achieved by an alliance with the core scientific value-objectivity. In this interpretation objectivity comes across as an ensemble of episteme and practices geared to (re)-cover the subjectivity of the dead past. No wonder, history is replete with the professional qualifier—history is objective, it is an account of ‘as it was’—in an attempt to suppress the role played by its authors. In this historical process, the dead come alive, as they are (re)-covered with an objective account, in the present. This fresh coating and layering of past is a cumulative exercise, under the aegis of history. Notwithstanding, the existence of established institutions, their norms and regulative practices combined with material and ideolo...

Despite Marxist derision, in spite of liberal aversion and in forms communitarians would not extend any regard or accord respect, identity and forms of politics it can spawn is alive and, as it were, parading its casualties in Manipur. More than a month has passed since violence broke out in Manipur between Meiteis and Kukis. Before surprise could be expressed over its scale and spread, terror and shock shot up and shoot at sight orders were issued, Biren Singh’s elected government stands in suspension and a unified command is in charge. Both warring parties of conflict are expressing two views that are similar ;  first both are finding all actors, authorities, agencies, powers and opinions as partisan and secondly both are talking about massacre and genocide of ‘their people’ ,  and state level involvement in the planning and execution of the violent events. As is the wont of areas designated as disturbed and under the AFSPA, the death count, disappearances and accountability...