Annie Zaidi's Blog, page 10

A new short story

Here's a new short story, recently published in The Charles River Journal. The story is called 'Jhimmi'. It was written after I began reading reports about young lovers in India, barely out of college, and the outcome of their loves. I was struck by the strength of their love, their courage, their big hearts. Above all, that: their sheer heart. Their circumstances or fates are secondary after

No capes

One thing is clear. No heroes wear capes. They wear makeshift masks, often just a kerchief folded over and tied around their noses. Slender protection against the virus that can kill with so much as the touch of a doorknob, or passing through a room in which someone else has coughed. And they take their chances with death, because they must feed their families, but when they discover that the

Thinking of a madarsa during the lockdown

I walked away that afternoon with a heavy heart. When I looked around the building, I saw an open terrace where laundry was drying, and large rooms shared by several girls. This was not very different from the hostel I lived in as an undergraduate. It was just much poorer.In college, I lived in a hostel administered by nuns. It was very strict. We were not allowed to step out without written

A lockdown letter from where I am

My eyes barely left my phone screen. It was like being in a tunnel where the roof has fallen in, our collective hands bloodied from trying to dig out despite a lack of tools. All tunnels have ends, of course. Perhaps it will be three months, not three weeks. Or three years. Everyone says to brace yourself. On the other end of the tunnel could be a mess of an economy and millions of starving

Re-use, reduce, recycle

There's been this saree tag doing the rounds on Facebook. I was tagged too. I am not in a mood to post happy pictures. However, since many people here have spare time for reflection or experimentation or learning new skills, I'd like to tweak the tag and focus on how to shift our culture away from relentless consumption, especially of cheap garments. Excessive mass production of clothes means

When hunger is the tragedy...

My mother attempted to buy vegetables last week, right outside the gates of the housing complex, and she witnessed police officials preventing sales. A cart or basket had been overturned. Vegetables lay crushed in the dirt. She saw desperate folk picking up the damaged food when they thought the cops were not looking. Her recounting of this brief experience triggered something within me. That,

Truth and the pandemic

When was the last time there was a massive public uproar about our leaders concealing truth, or flip-flopping on facts presented in court, or lying in Parliament? Assuming falsehoods were based on faulty information, when was the last time our leaders apologised for misleading us?Far from seeing it as a ‘sin’, as a symptom of moral degradation with life-and-death consequences for us, we have

Not so rare

We like to believe that justice is served when a murderer goes to the gallows. Death offers closure. It also shields us from the awful truth that a society where such crimes happen with alarming regularity is broken, and requires a drastic overall. We experienced it as broken in 2012, when details of the Nirbhaya case emerged. The masses roared on the streets, demanding that something get fixed.

कश्मकश : एक नौजवान की लिखी बहुत पुरानी नज़्म

मेरे नाना साहब की लिखी एक बहुत पुरानी नज़्म. उस ज़माने में वो लखनऊ यूनिवर्सिटी में पढ़ रहे थे. उम्र क़रीब 22 साल रही होगी (नज़्म पे तारीख़ 1938 लिखी है). ये तो नहीं मालूम कि नज़्म में किस कश्मकश का ज़िक्र है लेकिन कुछ अंदाज़ा इस बात से लगाया जा सकता है कि 1941 तक वो ऑल इंडिया स्टूडेंट्स फेडरेशन के जनरल सेक्रेटरी रह चुके थे और जंग-ए-आज़ादी में पूरी तरह शामिल होकर जेल चले गए.

बाक़ी, एक नौजवान का दिल तो था

Being profiled

In other news, Facebook has finally successfully figured me out. It has my profile down pat:interested in literature (writing), films, culture broadly. It shows me ads for masterclasses in screenwriting by Mira Nair and Judd Apatow. One even by Margaret Atwood and if I was who I was fifteen years ago, I may even have jumped at that offer.Another time, FB showed me some ad related to writing -