To future English teachers : By Edwin Romond

 

Directions for saving your life : L E Bowman

 

Everything IS poetry : Georgie Jones

 

सचिन कुंडलकर यांची फेसबुक पोस्ट ( After Vijaya Mehta passed away on 30th June 2026)

 

आपण लिहिलेले संवाद नीट विचार करून , त्यांना आत्मसात करून आंतरिक शहाणीव त्यात मिसळून कॅमेऱ्यासमोर बोलणारी नीना अजुनी माझ्यासोबत आहे त्यामुळे विजयाबाई अजुनी आहेत आपल्यात. तसेच समोर धरलेला क्लॅपबोर्ड बाजूला जाताच आपल्या संवेदनशील चेहऱ्याने आणि हळव्या मनाने लिखित संवादांना आकार देणारी सोनाली आहे माझ्यासोबत म्हणून दुबे सुद्धा आहेत आपल्यात.

तीच गोष्ट वैभव तत्ववादी आणि सचिन खेडेकरची. पटकथेकतील ओळींच्या मधील शांतता ओळखणारे मन. लिखित वाक्यातील सबटेक्स्ट अचूक पकडण्यासाठी मेहनत करणारी माणसे. कुणाकडून शिकली असतील हि माणसे त्यांच्यात असलेली शिस्त , त्यांच्यात असलेला कॅमेऱ्याची जाणीव? कुणाकडून शिकला असेल सचिन खेडेकर प्रत्येक वाक्यावर मेहनत घ्यायला?

ज्यांच्याकडून वैभव आणि सचिन शिकले, सोनाली, नीना शिकल्या ती माणसे आमच्या पिढीसोबत सुद्धा अजुनी काम करीत आहेत. ही माणसे तोवर संपणार नाहीत तोवर त्यांनी त्यांच्या शिष्यांमध्ये पेरलेले गुण आपल्या भाषेचे नाटक आणि आपला सिनेमा समृद्ध करीत आहेत. दुबे . विजयाबाई , तेंडुलकर कायमच सोबत आहेत.

तुम्हाला आठवणारी शेवटची व्यक्ती संपली कि तुम्ही अस्तंगत होता. तोवर नाही.

................

By Dinkar Manwar

 

The last thing that will not be replaced : By Darby Pistilli

 

There are moments in life that we do not realize are significant while we are encountering them, but they become substantially more meaningful in retrospect.

It is usually not dramatic or clearly drawn out. It does not announce itself as insight, transformation, or a knee-dropping-everything-has-changed moment.

More often, it appears subtly, in quieter spaces of experience. Like when sleep will not come and a hand reaches for a pen in the dark without fully knowing why or what may flow from its fingertips. Or when a song is played on repeat on the drive to work, not out of enjoyment, but because it makes the day feel marginally more tolerable and less lonely. Or when the body begins to rock gently, almost indiscernibly, in an effort to regulate something that has yet to find language.

These moments scarcely get recognition as being anything important or profound. They do not resemble what we have been taught to identify as art. There is no audience to bear witness, no intention of sharing, no expectation of coherence. They are often dismissed as incidental behaviors, or even labeled as avoidance or reduced to something trivial. And yet, they persist across contexts and across people in remarkably similar ways.

In both my clinical work and my own life, I have come to recognize these moments not as incidental, but as essential.

Art does not always begin as the creation of something. It often begins as the connection.

It is something we see daily, yet something many have become desensitized to and do not recognize in its fullest capacity. These moments are less obvious, but they carry the same weight. The receipt at the bottom of a bag with sentences scribbled across it that someone may not remember writing, but recognizes it immediately when they read it back. The voice memo someone records in the middle of a drive because something inside them insists on being captured before it disintegrates into the ether. The way someone’s thumb may hover over a photo they almost delete, but keep it without fully understanding why they are. The notebook filled with half-finished thoughts and sketches that never become anything cohesive, but still feel like evidence of something real having existed within them. Even the act of rewatching a favorite TV show and admiring the director’s concept all over again, not because it was forgotten the first time, but because it lands differently each and every time it is witnessed.

These moments often are overlooked because they do not look like an artform in the formal sense. They are not refined, not structured, not built with technique, and are often not meant to last. They create a point of contact between the internal experience and something outside of it. They allow something that cannot be fully understood to take a newform, however briefly it may be, in a way that can be returned to. And in that sense, their significance does not come from how they appear, but from what they make possible when language is no longer enough.

Art is one of the last places where human experience remains intact, not translated, optimized, or replicated. 

The function of art becomes more and more apparent within the conditions we are currently living in. We are situated in a cultural environment that prioritizes efficiency, speed, legibility, and tangible outcomes. Increasingly, the human experience is translated into forms that can be measured, tracked, and predicted. Preferences become datapoints and mathematical equations, attention becomes currency, and expression becomes content. Even creativity, which was once assumed to be a strictly human domain, is now being replicated through technological systems capable of generating language, images, and music at a scale and pace that would have been difficult to imagine even recently, otherwise known as artificial intelligence (AI).

The outputs of the systems can often appear compelling and attractive. They can mirror tone, replicate style, and produce something that closely resembles meaning. At times, the resemblance is strong enough that it calls into question what distinguishes human expressions from simulations.

And yet, there remains a difference that is not easily reduced, but consistently felt.

It is the difference between something that mimics expression and something that emerges from within a lived experience. Where theses systems generate from patterns, human expression is shaped by memory, context, embodiment, and lived time. The distinction becomes especially visible in moments of rupture. Art has always been the looking glass into the world’s history. Historically, art has surfaced most prominently in the aftermath of collective grief, injustices, and loss, contexts in which institutional language proves insufficient. In these moments, people create. Murals appear, posters are made, songs are chanted in the streets demanding change, messages are written in chalk or painted across walls. Music becomes a container for what cannot be formally stated. These forms are often described as protest, which is accurate, but incomplete. Art does not only oppose. It asserts. It is evidence that something occurred and insists that it mattered and that it cannot be reduced, absorbed, or erased.

There is a more subtle dimension and, therefore, one that is more easily overlooked. Not all forms of resistance are public. Not all acts of preservation take place in shared spaces. This is a form of resistance that occurs in the small, often unnoticed decisions to remain in contact with one’s own internal experience in a context that frequently rewards disconnection. Allowing a song to continue playing when it begins to evoke an uncomfortable emotion, pausing in front of an image rather than moving past it, or staying with a feeling several seconds longer than one’s habitual threshold. These are not dramatic acts, but they are meaningful ones. They represent moments in which a person does not override or abandon themselves

In clinical contexts, we often speak about regulation as a prerequisite for deeper processing. A system that is overwhelmed cannot integrate; it can only defend. What is less frequently acknowledged is how often art contributes to the creation of the conditions under which regulation becomes possible. It does so not by directing attention explicitly, but by allowing it to organize in a way that feels tolerable. Art does not require articulation, nor does it impose coherence. It permits proximity without forcing exposure. For many individuals, particularly those navigating overwhelming or fragmented internal experiences, this is not simply beneficial. It is necessary.

It is also important to distinguish art from performance. The value of artis not contingent on the way it is received, nor is it determined by its visibility. A photograph that is never shared, a note that is written and deleted, or a piece of music listened to in solitude are not lesser forms. They are instances of a person maintaining a relationship with themselves in a context that increasingly incentivizes external validation and output. These forms are just as important.

It is evident that art also exists within the context of quieter functions : the preservation of something that resists being reduced or erased. It holds open a space where experience does not immediately need to be interpreted, measured, improved, or turned into something useful or into a form of monetary gain. In a culture that increasingly encourages us to translate our inner lives into something legible, something that can be shared, graded, or consumed, art interrupts that process. It allows something to remain as is, without asking what it is for.

And in doing so, art safeguards something subtle yet essential: the ability to recognize one’s own experience before it is shaped, edited, or repurposed into something else.

Even while technological systems continue to expand what can be generated, they cannot replicate the conditions under which something becomes meaningful to someone. They cannot reproduce a song that is not simply selected, but needed. They cannot recreate the precise configuration of memory, sensation, and context that causes a piece of art to land in a body with a particular weight. They can approximate form, but not origin.

Art is valuable because it emerges from the act of being human, of experiencing, of feeling, of remaining in contact with something that does not always lend itself to language or structure. It is one of the few spaces where subjectivity is not only preserved, but absolutely necessary.

What art holds, at its core, is not simply expression, but presence. It is evidence that something was felt, that something was experienced, and that something within a person remained responsive enough to reach toward it. It is a reminder that somebody was here.

In that sense, art is not only creation. It is refusal.

A refusal to disappear into efficiency.

A refusal to reduce experience into something interchangeable.

A refusal to abandon the parts of ourselves that cannot be translated, but can still be felt.

And in a world that is increasingly capable of replicating almost everything else, that refusal may be one of the last places where being human cannot be replaced.

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एकरूप : पूजा भडांगे

माझ्या अंधाराला
नको तुझा मोह
खुणावतो डोह
उगाचच...

उगाच लांघली
मनाची या वेस
तुझ्याच दिशेस
झेपावण्या...

झेपावली रात्र
पिसाटापरीस
त्यात ये भरीस
हाक तुझी...

हाक नको देऊ
कोसळतो धीर
तुझ्यात लागीर
जीव होतो...

होतात मनाच्या
लाख लाख ओळी
त्यात ही आरोळी
कवितेची...

कवितेच्या नावे
तुलाच लिहिले
आणि गिरवले
आठवांना...

आठवांचे ढग
येतात कधीही
माझी लाहीलाही
नेहमीची...

नेहमी जपला
अंधार कोवळा
तुझ्या-माझ्यातला
फुलापरी..

फुलांत गोवला
शब्द शब्द माझा
जसा सुई धागा
एकरूप...

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