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Odds and Ends

from the Indian Subcontinent 

 
"If you came this way, 
 Taking any route, starting from anywhere, 
 At any time or at any season, 
 It would always be the same: you would have put off 
 Sense and Notion."

	                  T.S.Eliott (Little Gidding)
Indian Tricolour

India celebrates its Destiny
India signed its tryst with destiny at the stroke of midnight on 15 August, 1947 - a destiny to emerge as an independent, liberal, secular, multi-ethnic republic. 

    
Churchill said India wasn't a nation,
just an "abstraction". John Kenneth
Galbraith, more affectionately and
more memorably, described it as 
"functioning anarchy". Both of them,
in my view, underestimated the strength
of the India-idea. It may be the most
innovative national philosophy to have
emerged in the post-colonial period. It
deserves to be celebrated-because its is
an idea that has enemies, within India
as well as outside her frontiers, and
to celebrate it is also to defend
it against its foes.
    
                            Salman Rushdie, novelist

1971 India-
Pakistan War

Mukti Bahini guerilla aiming .303 rifle in East Pakistan		 Remembering a Liberation War:
Twenty five years ago, India and Pakistan went to war over the issue of Bangladesh. Mukti Bahini guerillas and Indian soldiers swept past Pakistani defences and forced the Pakistani Army to surrender within two weeks. On the western front, Indians and Pakistanis fought a series of even deadlier battles. This 1971 War web exhibition commemorates that war...

Poetry


Daruwalla		 The Poems of Keki Daruwalla.
In 1987, Daruwalla's collection of Poems called "Landscapes" won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Asia. But Daruwalla, the poet, was well known in India much before that. He along with a set of other Indians writing in English had transformed the literary scene in India during the 1970s by asserting that "English" was very much an "Indian" language and could be a legitimate creative medium for Indians. In this section, we present the poems from Daruwalla's award winning collection, Landscapes.

Ways of Escape


Travels Image		 Travels in the Subcontinent. Written by a backroom bureaucrat, who never quite recovered from the infusion of Western Liberalism dished out by the Saihibs and who remains eternally dissatisfied with the state of affairs around him and with his own schizoid personality. Everything, according to him is the fault of the bloody colonialists or the brown babus who took over from the last rulers. The question is: I'm not ok but who the hell is?

Religion

Om Motif		 An account of Devraha Hans Baba, the yogi from Vindhyachal. This is a short piece written for people who expect miracles and when they don't get any, start believing in advertising.

Madhobima

Madhobia Ma		 Madhobima is for most appearances just another Indian housewife, living out a frenetic existence in a dusty corner of Delhi. Her house is perpetually full of people - family members, visitors and servants. Her courtyard covered with a fibre glass canopy is crammed with a small temple, potted plants and a cage full of singing birds. All signs of domestic contentment. Yet, beneath this obvious mudane exterior, Madhobima hides a mysterious profundity. This housewife is an ordained Tantric guru, cloaking awesome mystical powers.

Art Direction in Bollywood

[Desh Mukerji]		 Travel to Bollywood, the land of movies, magic and makebelieve. And find out about Desh Mukerji, whose movie sets have mounted many a blockbuster.

Our Music Maker

[image: Gautam Ghosh]		 A bit about Gautam Ghosh, the man who brought music to this site.

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K Media Private Limited is responsible for designing and putting up these pages but not for their contents. This collection is the collective outpourings of assorted individuals. Messages to any of the authors of the pages could be addressed to kmedia@subcontinent.com and we will ensure that they get them. This is a free service for some people in the Subcontinent who are quite satisfied with the idea of tossing a message in a bottle.