Sabriwithrealitycheck

  Between Two Trees While walking in the park today, I saw a pigeon hanging lifelessly from a thread stretched between two trees. I stopped. Walked closer, trying to understand what had happened. And then I realised— it was dead, caught in a killer thread: manjha. I stood there for a while, looking at that small, silent body, thinking about how something so ordinary to us can become fatal for another living being. We fly kites. We celebrate. We look up at the sky and admire the colours dancing in the wind. But somewhere below, a bird may be fighting for its life, caught in a thread we may not even notice. Perhaps that is what disturbed me most— how easily a life can become invisible. We speak of the environment in such large and distant words: climate crisis, pollution, biodiversity, ecological destruction. But sometimes, the meaning of all these words is simply a dead pigeon hanging between two trees. A life lost to something we created, something we u...

On Sitaram Yechury’s death anniversary, I find myself thinking not only about the political leader we lost, but also about the intellectual and political tradition he represented. For me, Yechury’s understanding of India, democracy and secularism was particularly important. He was a committed communist, but his politics was never detached from the constitutional and plural character of India. He understood that the Indian reality could not be reduced to one religion, one identity or one political imagination. I have always found his reading of Jawaharlal Nehru interesting. Yechury recognised in Nehru an attempt to build India as a plural, secular and democratic republic, while also placing socialism and economic justice within the project of nation-building. His own politics emerged from a different historical tradition, but he understood the importance of protecting the democratic and secular foundations of the Republic. His position on religion and the state was equally clear. Rel...