Biases: From Bollywood to Tinsel Town, Time to reform how we reform India.

The Comfort of Our Digital Echo Chamber, Word War 2.0: It’s Noisy on All Fronts, An Avalanche of Shame

Gandhi’s Army: Defending the Homeless, The Man against Madness in Noakhali, Gandhi on the Buddha Island, If Development Means Devastation, It is Not for Us

I am a Woman – Secrets of PT Usha, A Scene of Robust Hope against a Bleak Backdrop, Curating the Sporting Talent, Indian Hockey – Far Away from the Chak De! Moment, Dipa – Vaulting to Take Her People to New Possibilities...

Sixteen – The Age of Revolt and Death, Journey of the Learned Ones: From Paradise to Refugee Camps, Identity: Terms of Abuse and Endearment...

Rape of the White Woman in, Politics of the Woman’s Body, The Absent Narrative of
the Victim, The Wake for Damini...

IMAGINE THERE'S NO COUNTRIES
* Aditha Dissanayake
* Balraj Khanna
* Selina Hossain
* Amit Ranjan

Magazine of the New World

The Equator Line is to India what The New Yorker is to America, Cicero to Germany and Granta to England: cerebral, incisive and entertaining as well. TEL revives an old tradition of journalism which combines new writing with a close account of what is happening in areas like business, culture, cinema and lifestyle. 

The great periodicals of the past threw up new writers and triggered fresh debates about many issues. With the advent of 24x7 television periodicals lost their predominant position in intellectual discourse, in benchmarking our culture. A ‘breaking-news’ fever swept through India. The beauty of good writing was no longer recommendation enough. Newspapers carried more pictures and less copy. News magazines readjusted themselves to the television era with a new snappy, sharp look. And in the deluge of visual news the sensitive, sharp, upwardly mobile man seemed lost. Nothing was put into perspective for him. Nothing really tested his intelligence. The delight of surveying an altogether new horizon across the serried lines of good prose was missing.

TEL is a journey to rediscover the glory of the written word. Promoted by Palimpsest Publishing House, the quarterly magazine offers a brilliant spread – clinical analysis of trends, new fiction, deep examination of political events, gender issues, latest in diplomacy, spirituality, diaspora, the remote and the exotic. The candid camera captures sensitive images in keeping with the theme of the number. When repetitive surface news grates on your nerves TEL takes you on a trip to the land of good writing with an impressive line-up of well-known writers. 
Waiting for your flight at the airport or in a hotel room in an unfamiliar city, the latest issue of TEL will help you rediscover your world in a new light.

My Journey With Depression.

Where Have the Boys Gone?...

Phoenix is Not Just a Place in.

Images of an Invisible Illness.

Behind the Mask of Normality.

Psychotherapy in the Time of the Vedas.

The Rough & Raw Game.

The Hüzün of Indian Football.

Confessions of an Arsenal Fan.

Warriors with a Buddha Smile.

Boys are Burning Out Too Soon.

Of Falconers and Falcons and more...

A RIVER’S NAME

A robust young man bathing in the river is swept away by the tides. Such an incident anywhere in peninsular India is forgotten even before the rains are over. But the old woman remembers the loss of her man to the river decades later:
It happened years ago, in the month of Midhunam. Father had gone to bathe in the overflowing river at the peak of the monsoon fury. Amma had warned him many times, but to no avail. He had only smiled and said that he had known the river like the back of his hand since childhood. The river, even when in spate, could not trick him. 
But it did. The boatmen said that the river was sharp, flowing with a rare rage that day. Father’s friends swam to the bank and escaped. But the river snatched Father from us. Only days later did the bloated body float out on the beach. 
In the distant voice of the narrator, the man’s son, the tragedy comes alive in all its poignancy and atmosphere. The fatedness of coastal life has rarely been portrayed with such finesse. A leading writer in Malayalam, Sethu’s mastery in drawing a slice of life with a whole lot of cultural nuances is evident in ‘Her Corner of Earth,’ included in his latest collection of short fiction, A Guest for Arundhathi and Other Stories. The river here is like a capricious, vengeful goddess, snatching away not just a man, but a woman’s happiness as well.

One mellow October afternoon last year I reached the Wagah border, like many others, to see the military parade on this side of the international border, mixing a sense of grandeur and heroism. The buildup was electrifying. Hit Hindi-movie numbers extolling the virtues of sacrifice and love for the motherland blared from the high- decibel sound system. From my seat – quite close to the gate that stands as barrier between India and Pakistan – I looked around taking in the atmosphere. It was a mix of Bollywood and one-day cricket, tension in the air. The most pulsating song was sung with deep intensity by AR Rahman – Ma tujhe salaam... India, we learnt in our younger days, is a Nehruvian project. The air was so surcharged many were dancing, holding the little Tricolours, to the tune of the songs. The members of a large family were among them. A tall hefty white man, apparently from somewhere in North America, was winging, his mixed-race child in his arms. His Indian wife, her sister, other children – they all were swaying and clapping. The redoubtable elderly woman in salwar kameez, sitting next to me, kept time and clicked her fingers to wahwah her grandchildren.

When the Venetian merchant Marco Polo travelled across what is now the Middle East on his way to India and China in the late 13th century, it was an exciting place, a melting pot of ideas, influences and an amazing space where faiths intermingled. The intrepid traveller with an eye for the unusual, came across Jews, Christians, Muslims, Persians, Turks, Mongols, Buddhists and others. Though the Crusade had already been fought, cultures were still feeling each other out and imbibing each other’s influences and assimilating.  The degree of sharing and coexistence was indeed remarkable. According to Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela, another traveller of that time, the city of Baghdad, the capital of the Muslim Abbasid Caliphate, had 28 synagogues. Jews in Azerbaijan lived in complete harmony with Turks and others. In his Travels, Polo wrote about Nestorian Christians, Muslims and ‘idolaters’ living peacefully together. 
...

The core conflict in the primary epic, even an undergraduate literature student learns, is about the honour of a woman – Sita, Draupadi, Helen. The story spreads over war against the villain to restore that honour, to take the old, familiar world back to normal. Now take a closer view and what you get to know is that essentially every war is about territory, brute assertion of a potentate’s might to capture, control someone else’s land. And a deeper reading of the fertility myths in almost every culture shows the woman, or the female deity, as an extension of earth. This sublimation of human relationships into the elements has been elegantly captured by the Rigveda: 
                    
                                The Earth is mother; I am son of Earth
                                 The Raingiver is my father; may he shower on us blessings!
                                                                                              (Rigveda: 5.84)

In a hurry to prevent the miners’ further degradation of the mountains of West Virginia, she drives the rental car speedily along narrow roads on a bleak, foggy morning. Lalitha is inspired by her boss, Walter’s environmental idealism, the initiative of his trust to save the air, the forests, and many species of birds being killed by both domestic and feral cats, and follies of man. Born in India but raised in the US, ‘the suburban daughter of an electrical engineer’, she is beyond love and longing for a home across the oceans, and has sailed across the early struggle for adjustment to a new culture. Lalitha is unlike the characters you come across in Jhumpa Lahiri’s fiction. There is no in-between-ness. Her transition is complete. With remarkable courage, clarity, and passion she drives dangerously around the mountain curves to secure the most pristine, therefore most vulnerable, parts of earth before they are devoured by the greedy industry. 

At a rare intimate moment, drinking her second martini before dinner in a restaurant, she confides in Walter what she wants to do with her life.

“‘Can I ask a personal question?’ she said.

‘Ah – sure.’

‘The question is: do you think I should get my tubes tied?’”

Walter fumbles in shock, hastily looking around to see if the other people heard her. “‘It just seems logical,’ she said more quietly, ‘since I know I don’t want children.’”

SONGS: A WAY OF LIFE

Once I was in Chennai in the last week of the year to write about a crucial political meet for The Times of India. When I had to return to Delhi, I realized I had to wait for a day for my flight back. Nothing else to do, I loafed around the city, light and free – in the week between Christmas and the New Year you can enjoy the lazy sea breeze in Chennai without woollens. Around TTK Road I saw something absolutely fabulous - the city gentry, in their spotless holiday best, were sauntering towards the many auditoria. The men in their sparkling white veshti and half-sleeved shirts, and the women in gorgeous saris, their long, lush hair laced with jasmine strings. From inside those buildings rolled out many a heavenly rhapsody – sonorous and layered, even a touch elemental. The instruments – both percussion and string – merged with the high-pitched, melodious voices to transport the familiar surroundings to another world, a world where birdsong and raindrops are the only reality. Criss-crossing the streets in the comforting sun, I had a strange sense of loss – of the old identity, fond attachments, everything I’d known or cared for. The city with its quaint conservatism and coconut groves existed, the subdued stone-structured temples and giant cut-outs and all, and yet, the deep resonance of the music, its unearthly waves – all took you somewhere else, an enigmatic chiaroscuro of the known and the unknown.   
The month-long Chennai music festival is the renewal of a culture, a thematic structure to hold together the impulses of a society. I met the music critic of a London newspaper, here for the Margazhi season, who’d been coming down just for the music for a long time.  Like him, hundreds of music lovers still descend on Chennai from all around the world to be part of the festival. The life of a people, it seems, is defined by their music.

HER EARTH – MAULED AND BLOODIED

One lingering habit from my journalistic days is peering almost simultaneously at the headlines on half a dozen front pages along with cups of morning tea. Among the papers scattered around the desk is Dainik  Jagran, which I always read for a whiff of the heartland – the tremors and turmoil in the political nerve centres of a continent called UP. Recently, the heading of a story stabbed me into a terrifying numbness: Ladkiyoko samjhao, na samjhe to Ganga dikhao (Persuade the girls, if they don’t listen, kill them)! Chilling in effect, every letter came off the yellowish newsprint with murderous intent, like hooded executioners in Macbeth. That was the diktat of a Khap panchayat in an area in western UP where kisan leader Mahendra Singh Tikait once held absolute sway. The death order was for the girls who dared tinker with the so-called caste injunctions in the matter of marriage. Unsettled by the suddenness of the assault, I saw the gathering clouds of a war – the woman’s war – taking precedence over everything else around us. News of attacks on women, intimidation, harassment, molestation, institutional discrimination –tearing down a tradition known for its celebration of womanhood.


Leaving the Wars Behind
My earliest memories of war were olive-coloured military trucks trundling down the road towards the border of what was then East Pakistan. Grim looking soldiers – their helmets camouflaged – held their guns in absolute concentration, indefatigably alert. Children, often holding the elders’ hands, lined up along the road to cheer the men in uniform.  Barely five years old, I was one of them.  The year was 1965. In the uneasy blacked-out evenings, some of our neighbours would sit in a circle in our front room for the news.  Our black Murphy radio with its blue magic eye, placed on a shelf above, was a clear sign of our relative affluence. In a Calcutta suburb, every home did not have a radio in those days. Almost the entire news bulletin was about the heavy losses and retreat of the enemy. The men in the room would start a debate in no time about the prospects of the Indian Army.

Fugitive from Faiths


The opening verses of the Rigveda do not preach any religion, nor do they threaten the infidel. What comes across in the first few stanzas of the earliest of the Hindu texts is a people’s quest for warmth, awed as they are by the overwhelmingly dark, capricious night.   

“To you, dispeller of the night, Agni, day by day with prayer
Bringing you reverence, we come.”

The uncertainty of a people amidst unfamiliar circumstances seeking a little comfort and assurance from their god is poetry of unmatched quality. A while later the mood changes – the spell of fear, misgivings of the unknown replaced by cheerfulness, conviviality of tipsiness:

“Beautiful Vayu, come, for you these soma drops have been prepared:
Drink of them, listen well to our call.”

Significantly, all through the Vedas there are no references to temples. For the composers of such elegant lines almost betraying a modern sensibility, fire was the only means of communion with the gods above. Terrified by tyrannical dark nights, hostile forces all around, the community was still some distance away from the stability and rootedness required to raise structures of faith. The intoxicating drink of soma bringing them cheer was accorded divine status. Neither the Vedas nor the later texts of Hinduism acknowledge a single, male, dominant figure as the articulator of the faith, extolling him as divine. Rather, all across the scriptures we see remarkable instances of gender equality: Sita-Ram, Uma-Shankar, Radha-Krishna… Always the female deity ahead of her man. This refinement, among the texts of all religions, is unparalleled.

LONELY ON THE FRONT LINE : The Leadership Question

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The Equator Line is to India what The New Yorker is to America, Cicero to Germany and Granta to England:  cerebral, incisive and entertaining as well. TEL revives an old tradition of journalism which combines new writing with a close account of the fresh developments in areas like business, culture, cinema and lifestyle. 
The great periodicals of the past threw up new writers and triggered fresh debates about many issues. With the advent of 24x7 television periodicals lost their predominant position in intellectual discourse, in benchmarking our culture. A ‘breaking-news’ fever swept through India. The beauty of good writing was no longer recommendation enough. Newspapers carried more pictures and less copy. News magazines readjusted themselves to the television era with a new snappy, sharp look. And in the deluge of visual news the sensitive, sharp, upwardly mobile man seemed lost. Nothing was put into perspective for him. Nothing really tested his intelligence. The delight of surveying an altogether new horizon across the serried lines of good prose was missing!
The Equator Line is a journey to rediscover the glory of the written word. Promoted by Palimpsest Publishing House, the monthly magazine offers a brilliant spread – clinical analysis of trends, new fiction, deep examination of political events, latest in diplomacy, spirituality, diaspora, the remote and exotic captured through a sensitive camera, news from the world of books,  all that and much more.  When repetitive surface news grates on your nerves The Equator Line takes you on a trip to the land of good writing with an impressive line-up of well-known writers. 
Waiting for your flight at the airport or in a hotel room in an unfamiliar city, the latest issue of TEL will help you rediscover your world in a new light.

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The Equator Line - April - June 2019

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