A backpacked middle-aged man stood staring at a high school girl while she waited for her train to pull into Footscray station. ‘You know there’s more ice in Antarctica now than there was ten years ago, don’t you?’ he barked. The girl was on...
‘To free ourselves is to trespass, and to transform. It is through a creation of the new that that which has not yet existed begins to exist. To free yourself is to trespass. To trespass is to exist. To free ourselves is to exist.’ Augusto Boal, Theatre of the...
Consider the darkness and the great coldIn this vale which resounds with misery. (Bertold Brecht, The Threepenny Opera) In 1975, at the insistence of his publisher, VS Naipaul travelled to India in the wake of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declaring a state of...
Last Monday I sat with a true believer in the city of Auroville, a city-on-the-hill community in southern India. With the morning’s papers spread out before us, we got talking about the exit polls for the national election. They were predicting another victory...
In the spring of 1943, as the Germans violently suppressed the Warsaw Uprising, Czes?aw Mi?osz recorded life beyond the ghetto’s wall. In ‘Campo dei Fiori’, he describes Polish gentiles riding the sky-carousel ‘to the strains of a carnival tune’: The...
