Chai Chalk Chatter

My initiation to Dr. Tharoor’s literary work was with ‘Pax Indica’ and while I have come quite a long way from those days, I still enjoy what he writes. It was his ‘Why I am a Hindu’ that shaped my critique of an essential part of my identity which I guess was again negated with Kancha Ilaiah’s ‘Why I am not a Hindu’ but I guess this is a tussle which every thinking human will always have in their life. Coming to the most recent addition to Dr. Tharoor’s endeavor to provide direction to the idea of India, I think ‘The Battle of Belonging’ is a worthwhile contribution. It’s not that I agree to all he has written but we exist in a state of evolving discourse and as such not making any contribution to that discourse would be more demeaning than producing something which is evidently intended to keep up the spirit of an old diminishing elite. There are certain arguments in the book though, that cannot be denied – the most important one being the transformation to the idea of India. I b...

I was reading an article on scroll.in, shared by a friend on Facebook. This small piece of writing was initially meant to be a comment on her post but when I started putting my thoughts to words, it became too long for a Facebook comment and in fact became a culmination of the thoughts that the respective article managed to congregate, in my mind. For the original article, please follow: http://bit.ly/2uaC8xp I grew up in the traumatic 90's and the early 2000's. Even as a kid, more importantly a non-tribal kid, being called a 'Dkhar' (an outsider) was a very normal thing in the beautiful Scotland of the East. Children tend to have their own quarrels but them being of the racist nature, at such a tender age speaks about a cultural conditioning drowned in hate. I remember the incident discussed in the article and I also remember the shattered glasses. It was like the Scotland of the East's very own 'kristallnacht', except that it was in broad da...

Sitting by the seashore on a Sunday evening and admiring some photographs stuck to the walls led me to think of an encounter with this amazing American lady who had been staying in India for the past 7 years. In conversation, she revealed that she owned a boutique and a roof-top food joint, in the beach town of Pondicherry. It was she who introduced me to the concept of Cultural Sensitivity. When I went all out complaining about the existing moral policing in Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry (obviously being from North-East India, moral policing with reference to clothing is the first thing that a first-time traveler would notice, while traveling to so-called mainland India) and as to how ethnocentric they were. She told me only one thing, “Hey boy! You have come to their place and not them.” At that time I didn’t quite understand the gravity of those words. With time, though, it all became clear, the idea of ethnocentrism is actually both ways; the fact that I perceived the loc...