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Tuesday's Spell

✍🏽 Ash

Little breeze, falling leaves,

Brushing aside the curls,

She looked straight at my soul,

My eyes, drifting away.

Next dawn - same bench,

she lifted her head from her little world.

I saw her lips, widening a bit;

I realized it late, she smiled at me.

Drenched in the Tuesday rain,

I ran to the bookstore down the lane.

Among the several there, I felt her near -

Turning around, I saw her again.

She looked at me, holding my gaze

Her eyebrows raised, a grin on her face.

She walked past me, close to me,

Opening her umbrella, into the streets.

Few weeks, no see

It felt heavy - Months of hesitation

drifting over my head,

Pushing my soul through the snow.

I was ready to leave the bookstore,

A sudden warmth, the air felt like her!

Turning around, I saw her again -

But this time, I yielded.

Democracy Cannot Survive on the Promise of Democracy Alone

On the protests against the Chief Election Commissioner, the politics of power, and the meaning of a vote.

✍🏽 Harshit Toppo

There is something deeply unsettling about a democracy in which citizens have to take to the streets to demand accountability from the very institutions entrusted with protecting their democratic rights.

The protests in Delhi against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar are not simply about one individual, one political party, or even one election. At their heart lies a much more fundamental question: who gets to decide the terms on which a citizen participates in a democracy?

The controversy surrounding the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls has raised serious concerns about voter deletions, electoral transparency and the independence of the Election Commission. The Commission and the government must answer these concerns with evidence and transparency, not merely dismiss them as political allegations. When the integrity of electoral rolls is questioned, the burden of restoring public confidence falls upon the institutions responsible for maintaining them.

I believe this is where we must begin our discussion of democracy.

The vote as a question of equality

For all its imperfections, the universal adult franchise remains one of the most radical promises of the Indian Republic. It recognises that a citizen’s political worth does not depend on their wealth, caste, religion, education or social position. The vote of a landless labourer is formally equal to that of a billionaire. The political voice of an Adivasi woman in a remote village is supposed to carry the same weight as that of a powerful industrialist in a metropolitan city. But formal equality means very little if the conditions necessary to exercise that equality are not protected.

A person whose name is missing from an electoral roll does not merely lose access to a bureaucratic service. They risk losing their ability to participate in determining the political conditions under which they live. The consequences are especially troubling for those who already stand at the margins of economic and social power, for whom political representation may be one of the few available means of demanding a more just distribution of resources and opportunities.

This is why electoral integrity cannot be reduced to an administrative question. It is a question of political equality. A democracy cannot claim to represent everyone while remaining indifferent to the possibility that some of its citizens may be excluded from the very process through which representation is established.

Institutions are not above criticism

There is a tendency in contemporary political discourse to confuse respect for institutions with unquestioning obedience to them. We are often reminded that democratic institutions must be protected. This is true. But protected from whom, and for what purpose?

Institutions do not acquire legitimacy simply because they exist. They acquire legitimacy through the manner in which they exercise power, the accountability they accept and the confidence they inspire among the people they serve.

The Election Commission occupies a particularly important position because its authority depends on a public belief that electoral competition is conducted fairly. Its independence must be more than a constitutional aspiration; it must be visible in its decisions, procedures and willingness to answer difficult questions.

Criticism of the Commission is not necessarily an attack on democracy. In fact, when such criticism is grounded in evidence and demands institutional accountability, it can be an expression of democratic commitment.

Nor should we assume that every allegation made by the opposition is automatically true. Political parties have their own interests, and those interests deserve scrutiny too. But the partisan motivations of some critics do not make the questions they raise illegitimate.

The appropriate response to a serious allegation is investigation, disclosure and accountability. It is not enough to ask citizens to trust an institution merely because distrust has become politically inconvenient.

When street becomes the last forum

The images emerging from Delhi, with protesters confronting barricades and people being detained amid restrictions on demonstrations, reveal another tension within our democracy. The state possesses the machinery of administration, policing and coercion. Citizens, particularly those without economic or political influence, often possess little beyond their collective voice. Protest is one of the means through which that imbalance can be challenged.

From my perspective, this matters because democracy cannot be understood only through elections. It must also be understood through the distribution of power between the state and society, between those who govern and those who are governed. Elections provide citizens with a periodic opportunity to choose their representatives, but protest allows them to question the exercise of power between elections.

This does not mean that every protest is beyond criticism or that every action undertaken in its name is justified. Democratic dissent carries responsibilities, just as state authority carries obligations. Violence, where it occurs, must be addressed through evidence and due process. But peaceful dissent should not be treated as a threat simply because it makes those in power uncomfortable.

A state confident in its democratic legitimacy should be capable of tolerating criticism without treating the existence of criticism as evidence of disorder. When the response to public anxiety is primarily barricades, detentions and restrictions, the question inevitably arises: is the state attempting to resolve the crisis of confidence, or merely contain its visible expression?

Democracy as an unfinished promise

What troubles me most about this moment is the possibility that we are becoming accustomed to treating every institutional crisis as just another episode in the endless contest between political parties.

We argue about who benefits, who loses and which party is likely to emerge stronger. These are important questions, but they can also distract us from the more fundamental issue of whether the institutions governing our political life are functioning in a manner worthy of public confidence.

The crisis of democracy is not always dramatic. Sometimes it unfolds through ordinary administrative decisions, opaque procedures and the gradual normalization of practices that would once have provoked widespread concern. Democratic institutions may continue to function formally even as public confidence in their fairness begins to erode.

This is why the defence of democracy cannot be outsourced entirely to political parties. It requires citizens who refuse to treat electoral rights as privileges granted by the state. It requires institutions willing to subject themselves to scrutiny. And it requires a political culture in which questioning authority is recognised as a legitimate part of citizenship.

I do not believe democracy becomes stronger merely because elections continue to take place. It becomes stronger when citizens can participate without fear of arbitrary exclusion, when institutions can answer criticism without hostility, and when those who exercise power understand that their authority remains accountable to the public.

The protests in Delhi may or may not achieve their immediate political demands. Their ultimate significance will depend on whether the concerns they raise receive credible answers and whether the institutions involved take meaningful steps to restore public confidence. But the principle at stake should be beyond partisan dispute.

A vote is not a favour granted by the state. It is a right that places limits on the state itself.

And perhaps this is the most important thing to remember: democracy is not simply the promise that the people will be allowed to choose their rulers. It is the promise that the people will never have to surrender their right to question them.

Streets of Sorrow

 ✍🏽 Ash

Bloodshot eyes,

taking your breath away

Tears rolling down them,

forcing into you.

Brothers lost,sisters lost,

Parents and children too,

Who did actually lose?

The ones who won or

The ones who lost?

Streams clear and clean,

now are red and thick,

Streets rich and live,

now bleak and lifeless.

Who won? Who lost?

No one really knows,

Both lost,both rout,

The ones who survived too.

Victories written over,

the blood of many,

None are victory any,

those victories count,

To win against humanity.

Those losses are inevitable,

the war isn't,

Together let's break the wall of war,

To unite for humanity,to free the Dove. 

Some

 ✍🏽Anjali C

Some,  

They do their work, 

Just their work, nothing more and nothing less  

But do they realise that,  

They change things and people,

They change energies and lives, 

They change the world, 

In their own little ways,  

In their own big ways  

Those are the people who fill my heart 

The woman who covered the parking lot, double-checking to make space for another car in the queue  

The doctor who checked if her patient was all okay after the examination -mentally too  

The scrap dealer who returned the gold they found in the discards, - because they dealt with scrap  

The teacher for whom a student was an equal partner in their quest to understand the world a little more  

The officer who completed the medical insurance application in time for the discharge

The sanitation worker who swept the streets after the tree showered leaves and flowers, every morning  

The manager who stayed up with the drivers to ensure the milk vehicles left on time during the pandemic

The nurse who took another night shift, unsure if she was hallucinating the shadow or just six hours of sleep short 

The banker who explained the benefits and what they cost you

The housekeeper who doubly dusted the window to ensure the baby breathed well

The security who ensured everyone had left the room before locking - including the trapped little bird  

Those who quietly ran homes and lives  

Work that is chosen and unchosen,

Done with integrity

And, they change the world  

In their own little ways  

In their own big ways  

This world would not hold without them.

May we work toward a world where everyone gets to choose,

And all are seen, paid fairly, and know what they do matters 

Anklet of Inequality

 ✍🏽Jamal Hamid Saleh

The truth known,

Yet the trumpet of normalcy still blown,

Faith still in a system broken,

For we too benefit, though just a token,

Welfare abounded for us to see,

The stress of contradictions let it be,

Morality too cost a jewel,

Absence of it- abandoned beings and fates cruel,

Reminding you- of a king who in Madurai ruled,

Through only the death of an innocent wrath of his justice cooled,

Surrounded he was by courtiers quiet,

Innocence they knew ignored their conscience's riot,

Through silence chains they wrought,

Continuation and stability they sought,

Never in the name of justice has there been a slight,

That the weight of its own contradictions not set right,

Proven innocent was the unjust dead,

The courtiers still silent bereft of service now to the head,

A system broken facing ruin and wrath,

Consigned too were the courtiers to doom's path,

The king was gone,

The city burned and the courtiers too,

Along with it The edifice collapsed too,

Inequality is becoming our cage,

Our silence exposes us to the wronged one's rage,

The path our silence and inactions pave,

From Consequence, notwithstanding, our presumed utility shall not save

A Tea With Rohit :

Of Institutional Violence and the Theft of an Ordinary Conversation

 ✍🏽Aishwarya Prakash

January 2016, Banaras Hindu University
This was the first time I heard Rohit Vemula’s name. Tossed in newspaper headlines, taken carelessly in parliamentary debates, and becoming a rallying point for demanding change in the country.

At the time, I was a BA second-year student at Banaras Hindu University. Rohit was a research scholar at the University of Hyderabad. In my imagination, the distance between us felt enormous. Not just geographical, but existential.

To my twenty-year-old self, being a twenty-six-year-old research scholar seemed impossibly mature. My only interaction with such scholars was through teaching assistants who took some of our classes, and who felt like grown-ups who had life figured out and answers to almost everything. So, with this as my only reference point, I imagined Rohit to be the same — a grown-up with “serious grown-up problems,” beyond my emotional or intellectual understanding.

I read the letter he wrote before his death and was deeply moved. But in my youthful naïveté, I do not think I grasped its full depth. In my mind, Rohit became a philosopher. Someone who had understood life, found it unbearably disappointing, and chosen death with clarity and intention.

In my imagination, he was a grown-up and I was a child. I believed that when I reached his age, I would surely understand what he must have been going through. Some very complex problems perhaps which were beyond anyone’s help. And so, for this young, naïve savarna woman, enthusiastic about rallying for social justice, but far removed and insulated from the repercussions of resistance, he became just a name. A name that I, and many others like me, vowed never to forget in our protests, seminars, and conversations of commitment to social justice.

October 2023, Hyderabad

Nearly eight years later, in 2023 I visited the University of Hyderabad for an academic conference. I too was a research scholar now, funded with a UGC fellowship just like Rohit.

Friends who had spent some years at HCU had told me about its forests, lakes, and rock formations. I was eager to walk the campus, to finally see for myself the place that had lived in my imagination for so long.

Early morning on my very first day there, while the campus was still quiet, I started my stroll. I came across a small canteen and stopped for tea. I ordered lemon tea and was pleasantly surprised to receive it with basil seeds and mint leaves, all without asking! I remember thinking, half-joking to myself, how tragic my life was that my own university canteen tea could never compare.

I sat down on a nearby bench, cup in hand, finally ready to take in the calm morning.

And that is when I saw him.

A bust of Rohit Vemula, smiling serenely at me.

For a moment, I couldn’t process what I was seeing. I had been thinking about Rohit since I arrived on campus, but I did not know there was a sculpture of him there. The suddenness of his presence, the familiarity of his face in an unexpected place, triggered something overwhelming. For a moment, it felt like meeting someone deeply familiar in an unexpected new place.
There he was - immortalised in stone at twenty-six, and there I was sitting beside him, with two years more of life experiences that he never got to have.

In that instant, memories rushed back: the first time I heard of his death, the slogans, the posters, the speeches, the promises to remember. And suddenly, the absurdity of it all, hit me with crushing force.

When I first encountered Rohit through his writing, I was only twenty. He was a grown man in my imagination. But now, when I was twenty-eight, an age Rohit would never reach, I think I could for the first time see him for who he was, and not only for who I had imagined him to be. Someone who had not really set out to be another name, sacrificed on the quest for social justice. Someone more than the last letter he wrote. Someone perhaps who was just another youngster still figuring his way, and not the adult I had believed him to be in my naivety. Only because I had read one piece of his writing, I like countless others thought that I knew Rohit. But here was the harsh truth. I did not know Rohit. And I never would.

And so, I decided to sit there, and do the only thing I now could: have a quiet cup of tea with Rohit.

The Theft of the Ordinary

As I sat there, I imagined what it would be like if I had met the actual Rohit there, instead of his bust. He would have been a young man of thirty-three then. Perhaps an accomplished physicist, with many peer-reviewed publications, pursuing a post-doctorate, present at HCU that day as an alumnus visiting his old institution. Or maybe a political activist, working at the grassroots, there on campus that day to meet up with fellow comrades. Or maybe he would be both, or maybe neither of these things, and be someone else altogether. How are we to know?

Would he have smiled at me and acknowledged my presence? Would we have shared a conversation over this hot cup of tea and maybe found some mutual friends, our eyes lighting up in an instant of having found common connections? We would have perhaps soon wandered off on our own paths, going about our day. Would we even remember each other’s names after this brief conversation? Both his and mine are perfectly ordinary names after all!

So many questions in my mind, and yet no answers. Rohit was there right beside me and yet, he just wouldn’t talk. And in that moment my heart broke from having been denied the possibility of this one ordinary conversation.

We often speak of the loss of the exceptional when we talk about deaths like Rohit’s. Of brilliance cut short, of promise unfulfilled. But equally violent, and far less acknowledged, is the theft of the ordinary. The loss of conversations that would have been unremarkable. Conversations spent weaving dreams of a future while discussing the mundane present, or simply sitting in silence over tea.

These small, soft pleasures of life. The right to be banal, frustrated, hopeful, confused, and alive. Oh, so alive. These are not luxuries. These are experiences that everyone is owed simply by virtue of being.

What institutional violence steals, like that inflicted on Rohit, is not only futures or recognition, but also this very ordinariness. The joys that were taken away from him, and from all those who knew him and who could have known him in the future.

At twenty-eight, I finally understood the twenty-six-year-old Rohit in ways my twenty-year-old self never could. Rohit was perhaps like any other twenty-six-year-old, and likely understood the world no better and no worse than them. He was extraordinary for having battled his way through an unfair world to obtain a seat in one of the best institutions in our country. And yet, I am very sure that like other twenty-six-year-olds, he too had many extremely ordinary dreams.

Most research scholars our age worry about friendships, relationships, money, supervisors, deadlines. We complain about stipends, crack poor jokes that only we find funny, and struggle to hold our lives together. Some of us also worry about society. About injustice, about the country and the world we live in. We read, we write, we agitate, we get angry and often impatient.

If all goes well, we find a place in academia, research, or teaching. We contribute knowledge, mentor others, and build lives.

This is the trajectory every young scholar in this country deserves.
This is the trajectory I am walking today.
This is the trajectory Rohit too was walking, and exceptionally well.

So why did his path end the way it did? And why does it continue to end this way for so many others who share his caste and social location? Why have we made the most banal existences of life into privileges that we do not allow everyone to have?

Of Institutional Apathy

Our institutions pride themselves on merit while being devoid of empathy.

We have turned suffering into an agni pariksha, insisting that hardship is necessary to prove worth. But we quietly hand out invisible protective cloaks, of caste, class, and gender privilege, to some students. These cloaks allow them to pass through the fire unscathed, while others burn, scream, and break, as we nod along approvingly and say, “Life is supposed to be hard.” We repeat sternly that only gold survives fire.

Very few make it through the fire. And even the ones who do are burnt through. Forced to go through life feeling broken and wondering what is wrong with them, watching their peers strut about basking in the glory of their achievements, even as they are tired solely from the effort of surviving.

My twenty-year-old self, when she heard of Rohit’s death, imagined that he must have been facing very complicated problems. Problems difficult to solve, problems that compelled him to take this drastic step. But that day, sitting beside Rohit’s bust, I knew this was not true.

Rohit had very solvable problems. He was facing issues accessing his stipends. He had been rusticated from his hostel on so-called disciplinary grounds. He was being treated with apathy and unfairness. These are not complex problems. These are problems institutions can solve within a day if they are willing. And yet they didn’t.

If anyone had tried, even a little, Rohit could have been standing next to me in person instead of in stone. But it was not to be.

Institutions will watch students stumble, struggling to find their way through complex labyrinths that refuse to be welcoming, and yet will not raise a finger to help those who are drowning. All in the name of merit, neutrality, and fairness. And will never call it what it is: cruelty.

We need to ask harder questions of our institutions.

Why are we not protecting our students better?
Why, even after everything, are we still stopping at half-heartedly made and rarely implemented anti-discrimination laws instead of building active systems of support?
How long will we pretend that the fire is equal for all?
And for God’s sake, why is there a fire in the first place?

We need institutions grounded in warm empathy, not cold distance or burning tests. We need safety nets, accountability, and care.

Rohit was not just a name. Not just a symbol. He was a promising young man, who the society refused to lend a hand, even as he was visibly sinking for no fault of his own, in a quick sand which was of the society’s own making. Rohit did not choose this. No one ever chooses this. If he had a choice, as he wrote, he would have chosen to be a writer of science, like Carl Sagan. But again, like he said, all he could write was that letter.

What happened to Rohit was institutional murder. To call it anything else is to erase the brutality of the conditions that made it inevitable.

Our collective memory likes to remember Rohit as a symbol. But did he want to be one? We could not give Rohit even an ordinary life, so we try to compensate for this with an extraordinary death. But this will not suffice.

We owe him justice.
And we owe future students a world where this never happens again.

A Road to Irrelevance  

 ✍🏽J. Hamid , 30 Dec 2025

We look to a world,

To understand it in its entirety we try,

Notwithstanding our hesitation with cold precision we speak,

Certainty in human actions we seek,

Platonic forms we use to expel doubt,

Build wall of mathematics and jargon to keep the uninitiated out,

We showed ourselves and the society tinted mirrors and obfuscating mists,

Our hubris a function of all that we missed,

We seemingly understood elegance came at a cost,

Yet absent are the particularities of human existence that affect it the most,

A weapon and justification we became,

Adding consequences austerity inequality global capital and climate change to our name,

The orthodoxy kept it's vigil,

While those on the epistemic margins fought

To reclaim and remind what we were before,

Those who still remember,

Probably some long shelved heterodox ember,

Of what we were supposed to be,

Until our Ignorance and Certainty brought us and the society to grief,

To speak with ourselves we mastered,

With the masses whom we explained we forgot,

Our solutions to issues kept us interested,

Of our solutions the world outside knew not,

Empirics and theory sans polemic,

Our theories twisted with our consent by the charlatan's rhetoric,

Theorize explain and understand we long have,

Attempt to change we seldom have,

Represent advocate and empower we shall,

Our assumed neutrality we discard our duty we fulfill

Seeing and Being  

(on positionality)

 ✍🏽Aishwarya Prakash

I see you,

You see me.

If it ended here, it would all be well 

And what I saw, to the whole world I’d tell.

But if only it were as simple as this,

Many of life’s nuances we would not miss.

Because it’s not just that I see you,

Or that

You see me 

But also,

You see me seeing you,

And I see you seeing me.

And in the middle of all this,

How we think we are seen

Changes our being.

And the question remains 

How can two people ever see the same thing,

Or see anything at all?

Aren’t we all like the five blind men,

Each touching some part of the elephant 

One claiming it’s a tree trunk,

Another a rope,

A fan, or something more?

So unable to grasp it all,

The elephant remains unseen,

In the middle of all our seeing 

Even as each of us swears

That what we saw is what there is.

But if only we could learn to accept

That all our seeing

Is limited by our being 

Maybe,

We could all see

More than just what we saw.