imagink

Published by Women’s Feature Service; also at  Boloji.com [Author: Shivani Chaudhry | Date Published:  15 March 2009] It is now over four years since the tsunami wreaked its havoc. For most people in India, the tsunami is a closed chapter. The national media no longer considers it important to talk about rehabilitation or the status of the tsunami survivors. After all, a four-year-old story is not 'breaking news', is it? No news is good news, one assumes. Not in this case. Nothing can justify the current mess, nothing can pardon the government's egregious lapses, nothing can condone the fact that survivors are still living in tin sheds, unsuitable for cattle habitation, in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. On the one hand, is the sheer neglect and failure of the state to provide adequate rehabilitation and its direct role in abetting human rights violations of survivors. On the other, is a more planned political agenda of using the post-tsunami climate to maximize ...

[Date Published: June 2009] Prose may contain poetry. Prose could be poetic. But prose can’t really be poetry… at least not for me! So, after writing some prose, thought I’d post a poem, for a change. I wrote it after returning from a trip to Hyderabad, to visit a dear friend, in June 2005. Could it really be four years ago? But a poem’s soul is eternal… so how does time matter?