2 and 2 are five

  Tony Randall and the Grammar of Grace. There was something almost architectural about the way Tony Randall spoke. Each sentence felt meticulously engineered, a miniature edifice of cadence and clarity. He never uttered words; he constructed them, syllable by syllable, as if language itself were a form of moral carpentry. In an age so enamored with spontaneity, his precision seemed almost subversive, a quiet defiance against the slovenliness of modern expression. Randall did not perform language; he consecrated it. His voice, urbane, resonant, faintly melancholic, carried the conviction that speech was a civilizational artifact, one too sacred to be squandered. To him, vocabulary wasn’t a trophy of intellect but the apparatus of thought. Every word had lineage, nuance, and temperature. To misuse it was not merely inelegant; it was profane. Watching him on screen, particularly as Felix Unger in The Odd Couple, you felt that rare synthesis of comedy and conscience. Beneath the comic...

The collars of containers wear the blame of privilege, Stacked high in roof-touching cabinets, Housing the finest, untouched for everyday hands. Coriander wilts over sprouted grains, While the canister rusts with forgotten horse grams. Chickpeas and kidney beans grow restless, Crowded into a tin of quiet rivalries. Cinnamon and cardamom build their citadel, Bayleaf watches with a wary eye, And clove rolls away, unmindful of hierarchies. Gajar ka halwa and pulao sit in quiet discord, Pav bhaji is not denouncing barfi but looking for justice, Each waiting for a moment to outshine the other. In the stillness, the bangles fall silent, And the utensils gather, A muted witness to hunger unspoken. : Vedhase/stefilnova.

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 ...