By APARAJIT CHAKRABORTY in New Delhi | China Daily | Updated: 2021-05-10 07:21 Share CLOSE COVID-19 patients rest at an isolation center in New Delhi, India, on Saturday. The country s tally passed 22 million on Sunday, said the health ministry. [Photo/Xinhua]
India s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ruling party has suffered defeats in state polls recently as the country struggles to contain a surge in coronavirus cases.
Kerala, in the country s south, is one of the states that Modi s Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, was unable to win.
Relatively effective responses to the pandemic in Kerala have stood out and helped Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan secure a record-breaking second term in polls, experts said.
A scene from the play. Photo: Mohan Das Vadakara
A new play that explores one horrific moment in the past to raise unsettling questions about the future
There is something deeply troubling about Chennai-based playwright Prasanna Ramaswamy’s new play
This is my name. Long after it is over, it leaves you with a sense of disquiet and lingering insecurity. The 90-minute theatre performance featuring a large ensemble cast was recently staged in Chennai to somewhat muted response, thanks to COVID-19.
The play is ostensibly an exploration of the past Nathuram Godse’s defence of his assassination of Gandhi. Yet, in doing so, the play essentially raises uncomfortable, deeply unsettling questions about the future.
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The stereotypical image of the writer destitute, harried, neglected is hardly the norm in today’s Kerala. In the first half of the 20th century, writers hardly held regular jobs. Their income from writing barely met their essential needs. The writers of today are, by and large, part-time authors with full-time jobs. They are anchored in a middle/upper middle-class world with safeguards like a pension. Today, it is possible to make a decent living by writing alone there are many who do but it requires high-volume productivity and wide acceptance. There are many economically struggling writers. Their situation has got more to do with their inability, like thousands of other citizens, to win the rat race for livelihood than with their being writers. The individual writer may belong to any of these categories.
A play adapted from Paul Zacharia s Ithanente Peru puts Nathuram Godse under the spotlight thehindu.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from thehindu.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The honorific Guru, when used without a specific subject, refers to just one person in Kerala: Sri Narayanan or Narayana Guru. The reason is that he stands foremost as a spiritual guru and reformer among the sons of the soil who pioneered a modern society in Kerala. No other spiritual personality, woman or man, has equalled him as a humane, progressive thinker and radical, charismatic moderniser.
When he was born in 1856, the process of social change in Kerala had already been triggered through colonial influences Portuguese, Dutch and British that exposed sections of society to science and contemporary knowledge. Guru’s call for change, made from this fertile ground, was rooted in Kerala’s soil, empowered by a spiritual message that is as radical today in fact, especially today as it was then and accompanied by bold interventions against decadent belief systems, social and spiritual. Ayyankali, the legendary leader who led the untouchables of Kerala on a revolutionary quest for