Identity / 20.01.2015

By Vipul Rikhi Towards the end of September 2014, the Kabir Project team went to Lahore to take part in the Kabir Festival organised by Aahang, a student body in the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). Our visas hadn’t come through till the last minute and we hadn’t been sure of being able to go at all. But we finally made it. When we crossed the border at Wagah, we found bright, young students from LUMS waiting to receive us. It was a wonderful one week that we spent there. We were overwhelmed by the love and warmth with which we were taken care of by the student volunteers. The air in Pakistan felt very alive with political and religious churning (Imran Khan was leading a massive protest rally against Nawaz Sharif while we were still there). We set up a photo and video exhibit of...

Miscellaneous / 28.04.2012

By Hasan Altaf The poet Kabir died in 1518, so it is jarring to open a translation of his writings and read the following line: "O pundit, your hairsplitting's/so much bullshit." It is even stranger to look up and realize that the poem bears an epigraph ("It take a man that have the blues so to sing the blues") from the American musician Lead Belly, who was not even born until 1888. A quick scan through the volume reveals more epigraphs (Pound, Coleridge), a dedication (one poem is for Geoff Dyer) and vocabulary that Kabir himself could not have come up with: "Smelling of aftershave/and deodorants/the body's a dried up well…" Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's Songs of Kabir is not, it is safe to say, your father's Kabir.