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Rumble: the Indians who Rocked the World

Interview with Catherine Bainbridge and Ernest Webb   Introduction: The evening of the interview, I showed up at Catherine and Ernie’s door. Ernie had just come back from a rehearsal with the Montréal Symphony Orchestra for Tomson Highway’s opera, […]

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Escaping Agra – A short film by Pallavi Somusetty

[Note: The film was featured in the diaspora panel at the South Asian Film Festival of Montreal (October 2017) and generated a dynamic discussion, with the director in attendance.]    “Egalitarianism isn’t always a by-product of education and […]

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Minnie and Moskowitz and Jesse and Durga

Magnificent. Maddening. John Cassavetes’ Minnie and Moskowitz (1971) is a small story about big love. Seymour Moskowitz, played by Seymour Cassel, is a hapless parking attendant living in Los Angeles. He goes on dates, spends time with strangers at […]

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Mon environnement urbain

Démarche artistique Ma pratique photographique est inspirée de l’environnement qui m’entoure. Un premier projet abordait le thème de l’eau. Celle-ci selon ses différentes phases, son parcours, ses empreintes et la manière dont l’homme vit avec elle. Le […]

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Propagating ignorance in the name of the people

At the beginning of the year, I was invited to act as guest editor for the current issue of Montréal Serai on “Populism and the Erasure of History.” I had to ask the editorial team to clarify what that […]

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Wartin Pantois: Ephemeral works invoking the forgotten

Preface by Montréal Serai A high-profile yet anonymous artist in his hometown Québec City and beyond, Wartin Pantois is a breath of fresh air, a quiet voice of dissidence, a street artist, an agent of change, and a catalysing […]

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Sadaka-Reut: 35 years of creating hope

My name is Dina Gardashkin. I’m a Jewish Israeli, and the first time I learned what the word Palestinian really meant was at the age of 23. Since I grew up in Haifa, a city known for its […]

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Populism? All a game?

Things were simpler in the past. Authority figures told us what “our” gods wanted us to believe and how to demonstrate our beliefs. They established rules and the dire consequences of disobeying. They could even prompt those consequences to […]

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Aux limites du matériau

À travers mon travail avec l’argile, j’explore les notions d’identité et de territoire. La mémoire, le legs, la tradition, tout comme l’espace que j’habite, m’amènent à me confronter au temps qui se dérobe. J’aborde le thème du […]

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Populism: propaganda or pipe dream

As a political ideology, populism can be divided into an array of currents, beyond the obvious distinction between right- and left-wing. It can have negative connotations and be written off as demagogy by some individuals of the fortunate classes […]

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Speaking at Eye Level: Decoding the Language of Populism

A quick search of the term populism in cyberspace reveals its increasing popularity (no pun intended) in the last decade, in both traditional and social media. The term democracy, on the other hand, became de rigueur a long time ago […]

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Radius Islamicus

Radius Islamicus by Julian Samuel, Guernica Editions, 2018   “The radius islamicus is the farthest distance a camel part is thrown from the blast centre.” The narrator of Julian Samuel’s second novel is a “stateless” leader who supposedly spent more […]

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Sanitizing the Syllabus

Writing and rewriting history are primeval pursuits of human beings. Not all human beings, maybe, but at least those who care for power. The ones in power believe that the past can provide them with some displayable justification for their […]

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Populism: Mesmerize and Confound the Present and Sully the Past!

Sometime in 1976, Jean Baudrillard, the French philosopher, suggested that saturating the media with carefully selected flash news disables the concept of historicity, depth, intelligence and transparency in following daily events, and creates a hyper-reality that challenges or drowns out […]

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The “bigger” the heritage, the bigger the privilege

As we observe that the multitudes of heritages operate in competition with each other (“mine is bigger than yours…”), we find that ramifications of this scramble for influence pervade a multitude of cultural, political and economic spheres. In what follows, […]

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You & another poem

You will be the midwife To whatever little I have, You will be the midwife To what little miseries I cherish You will be the mast To my lost catamaran You will be the frozen froth of […]

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End of the Nation

Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. Soren Kierkegaard I The Europeans left with a vengeance, what I said to Lia. Now a new political atmosphere marred our lives with land masses falling apart and going into the ocean, it seemed […]

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Power and Privilege: My Heritage is Bigger than Yours

Acts of dispossession, ethnic cleansing, genocide, discrimination, erasure of cultures and languages go back to time immemorial. But the backdrop of events of the past two decades, looming catastrophic climate crisis, Trumpism and the rise of the “alt-right” across […]

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There is a Portal

Sound of water intensifies, from flowing to rushing, to almost a waterfall. Transforms into the sound of motor.

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Don’t Fence Me In

By my country, they mean India. Complete strangers will ask me how to get Indian rice to be saffron-coloured.