A nuclear bomb in this city would now mean a personal crisis, the harbinger of the impending apocalypse. The trope was set very early in childhood—that of a city under a tantalizing threat; even the most rigorous security upgrades and satellite surveillance were not enough to console the infantile fear with which I had come to the city.
Independence has brought us a self authoritarian freedom along with an idea of Nation which
Walter Benjamin, in his essay on Baudelaire, discusses that smell is the most powerful among man’s sensory perceptions. Any experience which is associated with smell suffers minimum data-loss as it finds a place in the brain, the storehouse of memory. An encounter with the same smell, no matter how many years after the first encounter, is most likely to bring back the earlier experience by an act of recollection, as Benjamin says, in a crisis-proof form.
In the previous article we had tried to arrive at defining Comparative Literature but that, as it appears, is a question that presently remains to be answered satisfactorily or rather conclusively. So be it. Before we move towards the possibility or impossibility of defining Comparative Literature (this vacillating tone is obviously sarcastic) there are some debts that we (and by this one means anybody who claims to study Literature) must acknowledge for they have long been taken for granted. One such debt the study of Literature in recent times seems to leave by and large unacknowledged is to the “Formalists” or the Formalist movement.
I don’t agree with those who say music can’t be a vocation. Music should never start as a ‘profession’. I have studied visual arts and it was supposed to be my profession. But I am not pursing it. Any kind of art practice is a way of life and shouldn’t really begin as a ‘profession’. At least that is how it works for me. When you think of your artistic abilities as your profession there is a certain pressure involved with it, because then you have to sell it to make a living out of it.
