Global Voices Online

Firstly, let us remember the victims of 9/11. Let us wish that the world leaders gather enough sense and courage to fight the root cause of terrorism, and not just resort to paranoiac ways like “racial profiling”. Like they say do not attribute malice to that which can be sufficiently explained by stupidity. We are living in interestingly stupid times. Stupidity is addictive. So is paranoia. We should fight both.

Unsurprisingly, there are posts on 9/11. Satish Kumar writes about his experiences on that fateful morning. It was a picture perfect day and he was working in his office 5 miles away from the Pentagon. Well, and then, a lot has happened in the world. In America. In Afghanistan. In Iraq. Everywhere.

On a side note, it is interesting that hardly anybody talks about the other historically important thing that happened on 9/11, exactly a hundred years ago: The birth of Satyagraha.

Jeevishivu offers a lot of losely knit, yet very insightful, views on his reading of a short story anthology by the young Kannada writer Vivek Shanbhag. The anthology is called “mattobbana samsaara” (literally, Another Man's Family). He is specially concerned with the questions that one of the stories - “saravana services” - raises in him. He says the story explores the bigger relationship of an “India” with a “modern world”, by engaging the reader to seemingly ordinary contemporary incidents and interpersonal relationships. Although this is not novel in the Kannada (or any other) short story tradition, the story is outstanding due to its completeness in depicting the writer's intent. Since I have also read the anthology a couple of months ago, I can say Shivu is making a lot of sense.

An important “young” Kannada poet turns er.. old. Well, his age. B R Lakshmanarao turned 60. It does seem quite a wonder to Sriram, like it seems to many others. He is known as a romantic poet, a naughty poet, a popular poet, an evergreen poet, a “cassette” poet - a lot of his poems are fairly popular songs, and it is said he mainly writes to quickly convert his poetry to cassettes. An important poet nonetheless.

Sudarshan has an interaction with the renowned Kannada short story writer Raghavendra Patil in Patil's house in Malladihalli, a small village in Chitradurga district, central Karnataka. He, along with Chandrashekhar Talya, a well known poet, talks about (more…)