Profile of Kushal Poddar
Choreographed chess moves that hint at medieval statecraft, feudal hierarchy, fight for land and crown, and the art of defending territory. But should we analyse the art and the game this much?
Chennai shivers with the chess fever, and yet does not lose the poise while celebrating and hosting the prestigious 44th Chess Olympiad, 2022.
They dance so adroitly and gracefully, Laxmi. Oh, is she/he Kinnar? Rubia? Is she/he Tagore's Chitrangada? Their existence questions the partition of inside and outside, gender and sexuality, twilight, and the monsoon night?
We live in the age of pyar dosti hai on the one hand, and opposite sexes cannot stay friends on the other
The mills in Mumbai, when you finally stand in front of one, wear the look of a vagrant with a half-burnt cigarette hanging unlit from his mouth.
Photographer Ritesh Uttamchandani knows his Mumbai; he watched its continuous premiumisation, its transformation, the language of the posters, changes they predict, and the journeys they undertake
All the poets are not enthralled by rain. Kushal Poddar writes that he has trust issues with the shower.
Artist Shambhavi Singh's art is forged using sickles in works like 'Reaper’s Melody of Kaatani Geet, 2018' and uses motifs like the goddess in 'Red Kali 2009'. But the presence of black and water in her solid artworks reflects the ravages of the 1975 Bihar floods on the collective memory of a state.
The ghost of sunlight haunts us down, and when we meet it begins a story we have been hearing for millions of year. Kushal Poddar receives the buzz and transits that here.
An exhibition explores the emotive world of Bangladeshi photojournalist and activist Shahidul Alam’s photographs. Some of these photographs are haunting while others capture glimpses of a world that exists but often remains unseen.
If Derrida would deconstruct the subliminal literature of the humdrum of the days, evenings, and nights, perhaps he would say that do not believe what the poet writes but do find where he leaves a space. Poet Kushal Poddar synthesizes the daily routines, coffee, dreams, deaths, and hardworking laborers.
They utter something as one and in chorus. I tell them, I don't want to be late for my lecture on the importance of being dishonest about climate change.
“How was your day?” I ask my wife as if I can still ruin it...
Vignettes featuring a morning-walker, a kitten and a crow, oblivious to the tremors of violence. The after-blast rain reveals skeletal basics. What does peace see at her windowsill during war? A dove? Or a falcon?
The fingers can make you feel - I open a flower one petal at a time/until nilch remains of it except a sense of loss and gain we lose again and again.
Kushal Poddar's new poem delves into the anatomy of death and glimpses of a funeral.
Our shadow has flatfoot and it rolls down/to the estuary of obscure.
'Perchance it denotes only/the season, slant of the afternoon'
The statues mark a point of time; time removes them; the new statues represent some different ideology; common men and onlookers remain unchanged beyond their individual lifetime and psyche.
The flesh and the rot, rot and fish/fish and us become one
The farmers' protest that went through the entire 2021 was sustained by numerous camps, tractors, and deaths. As time welcomes new dawn, a tribute to the farmers' agitation through the eyes of a poet.
As another year begins under the shadow of the pandemic, here's a short poem to begin New Year 2022 on a thoughtful note.
Snapshots of Patna seen through photographs—people, places and poetry
Stand-up comedians, ‘two-nation theory’ and other stories that failed to tickle our funny bones