2 and 2 are five

We pray for fifteen minutes but lie in perfect grammar the rest of the day. F ifteen minutes......that is all it takes for us to enact religion each day. We bow our heads before mute idols, murmur archaic hymns, fold our hands with perfunctory piety, convinced that these fleeting genuflections will purchase us redemption.  But what of the remaining twenty-three hours and forty-five minutes? That vast dominion belongs to language. It is language that procures our daily bread from weary vendors beneath dilapidated awnings, pleads our causes in sepulchral courtrooms, seduces and betrays within silent chambers, composes elegies for our departed and nocturnes for our restless progeny.  Without language, prayer is naught but the stirring of vacuous breath within a shadowed room. scripture becomes mere pulp pressed into forgotten pages. Even silence remains an unformed abyss until language arrives to consecrate it with a name. We flatter ourselves that faith defines us. Yet long befo...

I imagined your death before your birth, it made your silence easier to understand. When you left, there was no funeral, so I carried the ritual each day. A quiet ceremony, bearing the weight of things unsaid. I tried to swallow you whole, not in hunger but in need, to become part of my breath. But love is not a vapory chimera. It clenches a stubborn shadow, stained beneath the skin, refusing release. Is death a malignancy or liberation? I ask not with sorrow but with restless thought. Time away, almost cruel, never learned mercy. And love is not biodegradable, but life-processed. She is a woman of virtue, so resolutely good that her kindness suffocates, a mirror reflecting society's unyielding demands. She lingers, not free yet unbroken, an ineffable enigma the cosmos hesitates to unravel. Written by : Vvu.

Dust of the Glorious. I marched where Ganga weeps through waste, Where tricolor dreams rot in haste, My blood boiled like Churchill’s scotch, But cooled in Delhi’s metro watch. I fought with pens in bazaars bare, Echoes of Tharoor in Lucknow air. Shakespeare groaned in chai-stall plays, While Dickens wrote in Bombay's haze. "My country right or wrong" felt thin, When sons of soil sold truth for gin. Plath wept beneath Kashmir’s white sheet, And Rashid sang from Siachen’s beat. written and published by: Vaibhav Vedhase Upadhyay.

“Inkless Republic”   I’ve met gods in secondhand bookstores, watched their sermons drown in footnotes and dew. V.S. Naipaul whispered, “Ruins aren’t history, they’re warnings.” Salman Rushdie lit incense over graveyards of exiled truths. Charles Dickens drank tea with beggars and barons, while Edward Gibbon muttered, “Empires rot from the spine.” Barack Obama, tired but intact, said, “Hope’s a quiet protest, not a campaign.” Friedrich Nietzsche screamed: “Live first. Then dare to think.” Oscar Wilde smirked: “But dress your wounds in wit.” Bertolt Brecht painted famine in shadows and bread, and P.G. Wodehouse wrote laughter like rebellion in bed. Bertrand Russell sat cross-legged, scribbling doubt like scripture. Christopher Hitchens flung gin at God and Oxford. Winston Churchill smoked history into speeches, Shashi Tharoor rewrote it in postcolonial rhythm. Edward Said hummed exile into every verse. Michel Foucault traced power through veins of silence. William Shakespeare stared ...

A Journey through Modern Historical Non-Fiction: Four Perspectives on India and the World. In the past four months, my intellectual journey has been profoundly enriched by four seminal works of historical non-fiction. Each book, in its own distinctive way, engages with the long arc of India’s history, culture, politics, and place in the global order. Though they differ in style, scope, and sensibility, together they form a powerful mosaic of India’s past, present, and future. Here is a reflection on each. 1 . The Golden Road by William Dalrymple William Dalrymple’s The Golden Road is an exemplary work of historical non-fiction, combining the rigour of archival research with the narrative elegance of a master storyteller. To borrow Maya Jasanoff’s apt description:   Dalrymple researches like a historian, thinks like an anthropologist, and writes like a novelist. In The Golden Road, Dalrymple explores the intricate web of connections that linked India to the wider world...

MIYAZAKI, SATIRE, AND THE DEATH OF THE ARTIST. Congratulations, humanity! we have finally outdone ourselves. progress! That magnificent locomotive of human ingenuity, now barrelling toward a future where art is no longer a labor of love, but a neatly arranged sequence of algorithmic probabilities. What a relief! No more agonizing over composition, no more excruciating brushstrokes just cold, unfeeling computation assembling pixels in a manner that pleases the untrained eye . The very essence of efficiency, some might say. But efficiency has never been the bedfellow of beauty. For centuries, art was a dialogue between the creator and the medium, between the work and the world, between the audience and the ineffable. It was an act of defiance against time itself, a refusal to let fleeting moments slip into oblivion without first being rendered in pigment or prose. And now? Now it is a product of mathematical convenience, a lifeless simulacrum that mimics aesthetic grandeur while posses...