Share this page!

Enter URL or ID to Unroll

You can paste full URL like: https://x.com/threadreaderapp/status/1644127596119195649
or just the ID like: 1644127596119195649

How to get URL link on X (Twitter) App

  1. On the Twitter thread, click on or icon on the bottom
  2. Click again on or Share Via icon
  3. Click on Copy Link to Tweet
  4. Paste it above and click "Unroll Thread"!
  5. More info at Twitter Help
Sunil Menon Profile picture
Sunil Menon
@kazhugan
Managing Editor, Outlook.... Linguist manque.... 'In Walked Bud'
May 6, 2023 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
2018. Kerala floods.

Everybody had fled, abandoning my old parents.

This man whose name I do not know, he returned and carried my paralysed 87-year-old father on his shoulders for two miles in waist-deep floodwaters.

I only know him as "Mustafa's brother".

#MyKeralaStory It had been raining. Incessantly. For days.

And old paddy area on the edge of town. Now suburban housing. Naturally, low-lying and vulnerable. But they all said "no danger".

At night, as the rains kept up, pond and drain and surrounding wetlands all merged into one big ocean.
May 6, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Image My seven-word film review...
Jul 7, 2021 • 12 tweets • 4 min read
Go well, Yusuf saab.

For me, he reinvented speech itself for Indian cinema. Taking it away from the distant theatrical orations of the likes of Sohrab Modi. Down to ordinary human speech, intimate whispers, mumbles, bringing a sense of nearness and interiority.

#DilipKumar The classic clash of styles came in Mughal-e-Azam, where his soft, sensitive Salim faced off against the thunderous Prithviraj Kapoor with...yes, words...but also silences, and speaking eyes.

The scene that framed this the best is his very entry....
Jul 5, 2021 • 15 tweets • 4 min read
Too late. This is nothing else but murder. Mark my words, #StanSwamy will make a last stand for freedom...everybody's freedom... from his grave.
Jul 5, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Free #StanSwamy before it becomes judicial homicide.

// Before his arrest nine months ago, he was physically independent and could eat, walk and take a bath on his own, but since his judicial custody, “all that is disappearing one after the other". // 

outlookindia.com/website/story/… "Why must a veteran tribal rights activist with multiple ailments be compelled to suffer in this manner at his age on CHARGES THAT ARE YET TO STAND SCRUTINY IN COURT?"

He is 84, has Parkinson's and lumbar sponsylosis...and has been brought by the "system" to ventilator stage.
Oct 8, 2020 • 9 tweets • 4 min read
A bouquet of powerful essays by #Dalit women writers. All of them wrote from the trenches, from an embattled zone. A whole experiential domain opening up, always enlightening, disturbing the received opinion, challenging the old discourse, enriching, humbling.

#DalitLivesMatter That striking cover art, deeply personal, contemporary, yet adorned by the old nature motifs, is by Dalit artist Malvika Raj. She works with, breaks and extends the Madhubani idiom, giving us powerful art. Some iconic images -- Savitribai, Ambedkar, Buddha -- partner the essays.
Sep 2, 2020 • 8 tweets • 6 min read
@TIinExile @neha_aks Yes, but it finally does, does it not, somewhere during what can be called the classical phase, leaving not much of a trace in the post phase. What we see is clearly a very interesting transition to total patronymy. @TIinExile @neha_aks Yes, there's clearly a widespread tendency attestable -- often the figure of the father is more fleeting, and it's also matrilocal. In this case, you also marry that against the overall tendency and attitudes from the devas, despite being kin.

Aug 31, 2020 • 19 tweets • 8 min read
@TIinExile Hi TN, okay, this is how I would offer my response. It comes not from any hasty perusal of literature, I did not do it then, and I did not it now -- in fact, took your words at face value and issued a corrigendum on that factual point on my post. But they come from a deeply... @TIinExile ...considered view of things over decades of knowing/living a reality, just like millions of others, and you could spare some space in your mind and heart for it, if you do have that space. There exist multiple tracks here, in plain view. Tying them up is the lore related to...
Aug 30, 2020 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
This has got to be the most unintentionally hilarious one ever :)) utter innocence on three counts:

a) whether a stable form of Bali iconography exists (it doesn't)

b) how a "Christian saint like Jesus" (!) is depicted

c) most cripplingly, what native Indians really look like! Image Here's a small sample of Bali iconography picked from Wikipedia. This is from Badami, Karnataka, 7th c AD, with the Bali figure highlighted on the right. Doesn't look very much like a member of the "choti and thread" club :))) ImageImage
Aug 6, 2020 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
It's not just physical structures or social, constitutional niceties that are being dismantled. The Handicrafts Board is now history. Yes, you heard that right.

Laila Tyabji writes: "Strange things happen quietly in COVID times - without even a whisper of warning....

1/n "The news that the almost 70-year-old All India Handicrafts Board, established in 1952 by Pupul Jayakar and nurtured by Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, has been abolished came as a complete surprise. All these years on, it remained the one official forum, however watered down...

2/n
Mar 28, 2020 • 20 tweets • 6 min read
Why are the police bestialising us? Why are humans trying to get home, with no other means to do it except on their feet, being brought to their KNEES? Crawl, duck-walk, frog-march? The symbolism is unmistakable. My column.
outlookindia.com/website/story/… "The physical evacuation of our streets has produced a strange kind of vacuum. A voiding of citizenship and its rights. And into that void flows only one thing: the State and its absolute writ. And that of the police, the advance guard of the State."

Feb 2, 2020 • 14 tweets • 5 min read
Many of his points of critique on the Left/Nehru/Gandhi are valid in ways but hyper-exaggerated. He's plain wrong on the Constitution. And his idea of "hamara ilaaka" is as bad as Hindutva.

#SharjeelImam is a cocky, hot-headed scholar with a hero complex.

But a seditionist? No. His right to be free from the outrageous sedition charge has to be defended against the fact that it was #SharjeelImam who first wanted #ShaheenBagh wound up. When he pulled out in early Jan, he declared in a cock-sure tone that the movement would "die a natural death tonight".
Dec 14, 2019 • 18 tweets • 4 min read
Sharing a post by Bhaskar Chattopadhyay, a friend's friend who I do not know, in which he writes about his experiences of growing up as a #Bengali in #Assam in the '80s and '90s. Though I do not know him, I know and share that experience about being an insider/outsider. Thread... //I am a Bengali. I was born in Cooch Behar (now in WB) and since my father was posted in various parts of the #NorthEast, I spent 16 years of my life in that beautiful part of the country, mostly in the lovely little town of Dibrugarh, #Assam.//