Poet Adil Jehangir Jussawalla will be the Poet Laureate of the 12th Tata Literature Live! The Mumbai LitFest 2021.Adil Jussawalla s many-layered, clear-eyed, uncompromising poetry is mainly rooted in the city landscape, describing equally its .
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971 SAD STATE OF AFFAIRS: Natasha Narwal was booked under the UAPA for her alleged role in the Delhi riots. She was later granted interim bail for attending the last rites of her father. PTI
Keki Daruwalla
Author and Columnist
RECOVERING unsteadily from Covid-19, one had to choose between two titles, ‘Pinjra Tod’ and ‘Shav-vahini Ganga’, the poem by Gujarati poet Parul Khakkar, which caused ripples in the US and Gujarat these two months. Such was the fury of the right-wingers on reading the poem that about 28,000 misogynist and abusive epithets were hurled at the poor lady, who wrote down the sad narrative of corpses being carried by the Ganga.
Keki Daruwalla
At the moment it is hard to point out victors or the vanquished in our land. The virus has beaten us all. There has never been a worse time for the country. Kurukshetra and its 18-day war, and the three battles of Panipat, and centuries later to our retreat in 1962 would be no match to what has been witnessed in the oxygen-devoid hospitals in our country. Our mahamari in history put together could hardly match the current ravages, virus plus electoral meetings, put on by Delhi, and the destruction of the Central Vista to follow.
But willy-nilly electoral battles are fought on the ground. Hence I was quite disappointed to find analysts like the once Prasar Bharati chairman shifting the scene to some mythical war in the skies Durga Ma versus Jai Sri Ram. For too long has Hindu iconography dominated Indian thought, and even, by extension, Indian politics. Forget your legends, demons, demon slayers, Mahishasur Mardini. Get back to real struggles on the ground, and figh
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Keki Daruwalla
History is cold, almost torpid, or there would have been tremors when in March Pope Francis, in true Christian humility, went to Iraq and met the Grand Ayatollah, Ali al-Sistani. During the Crusades’ era, the Moorish conquest of Spain, with Ferdinand and Isabella to follow, this kind of a meeting could not have been imagined. But history did not bother after all, it was not the Vatican coming to the Kaaba. The Pope met al-Sistani at his spartan residence. He had come as a gesture incarnate also to say that Christians should remain immune to persecution in Iraq and other Middle East countries. Anti-Christian feelings were aroused by George Bush’s invasion of Iraq. It would not have been lost on other Muslim countries that he came to meet a senior cleric of the Shias, who comprise just 10 per cent of Muslims. He had previously been to Jordan and in 2017 he had gone and met the Grand Imam of Al Azhar, Sheikh Ahmed Al-Tayeb, a Sunni leader of renown. The lar