Howzzat!

Presence is a great mystery, and presence in absence, which Jesus promised and has epitomized, is, at a human scale, a great reality for all of us in the course of ordinary life. I am persuaded for the moment that this is in fact the basis of community.   “Imagination and Community” is an essay by contemporary American novelist Marilynne Robinson published in 2012 among her collection of essays “When I was a child I read books”. Robinson believes “the more generous the scale at which imagination is exerted, the healthier and more humane the community will be.” She insists it is imagination which spearheads a community, into loving people who are not personally acquainted with one another, on several “grounds”. It is with these conditions that she finds a problem with, as they cause boundaries to be drawn, limiting the role of imagination. “… They insist that the imagination must stay within the boundaries they establish for it, that sympathy and identification are only allowabl...

“In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property” That’s the manifesto, written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in a nutshell. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels In the first section of the manifesto  “Bourgeois and Proletarians” , Marx states that in “the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles”, it is the bourgeoisie (the middle class) who   were instrumental in instigating the working class to revolt against aristocracy for economic gains and not the other way around (at least until the time the Manifesto was written) The next piece “Proletarians and Communists” has Marx defining the role of Communists with respect to the common folk “The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: (1) In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire pr...

“Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.” T.S Eliot was a Boston Brahmin, a name given to the erudite city dwellers of Boston, believed to be descendants of the early English settlers. The origins of the term ‘Brahmin’ (evoked curiosity given his inclination to Eastern philosophy) apparently  had    little to do with the system but rather a fancy name coined for the elitist purist faction of the city, albeit inspired.   A considerable number of literary insiders consider Eliot the most important literary critic of the 19 th century and I think this played an enormous role in substantiating his identity as a prominent poet and thinker of the era as well. Eliot is widely acknowledged to have been one of the foremost to weed out the persona of ...

In the odd pages of Pavić’s magnum opus, the various trials undergone by the ‘great walking parchment’ is described in much detail. An envoy is sent to the Byzantine Emperor Theophilus with his entire body tattooed with Khazars’ history and topography. He lets his hand get chopped off in Constantinople when a man pays in solid gold for the second Khazar year chronicled on his left palm. He is forced to return to the Khazar capital from time to time so that the inscriptions can undergo multiple corrections and new additions. His daily bread comes from hours of standing still so that the Greek and other scribes could copy the Khazar history from his back and thighs into their books. He ultimately passes away, unable to bear the incessant itching brought about by the prized inscriptions and “…and it was with relief that he died, glad to be finally cleansed of history.” I found The Dictionary of Khazars to be an ode to the life of this great walking parchment who is belie...

The year was 1938. Under the guise of rescuing the Sudeten Germans, Hitler assumed control over the frontiers of Czechoslovakia. The Munich pact signed between UK, France, Italy and Germany readily paved the way for him. The rest of Czechoslovakia was wrested a year later from a meek leadership and was brought under the realm of the Nazis, driven endlessly by their desire of establishing the Aryan Supremacy in Europe. This annexation was met with almost no military resistance and made millions of Slovaks who constituted “the others” vulnerable to mindless persecution and inexplicable wrath. Anti-Semitism was not the only threat. “The others” also constituted Slovaks who tried to flee their Nazi-held Czechoslovakian homelands, homosexuals, artists who dared to decry the Nazi authority and the Communists. Members of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CPC) were already ostracised by the incumbent democratic Government in Prague prior to the arrival of the Nazis. Julius Fučík joi...