Song of a Reformed Headhunter

A poem for the 70 individuals who walked to Singapore's Istana to deliver 140 letters to the PM on 2 Feb 2024, as part of the National Day of Solidarity with Palestine. 3 of them--Sobikun Nahar, Siti Amirah Mohamed Asrori, and Annamalai Kokila Parvathi--were ridiculously charged with disturbing public order by illegally organizing, or abetting with organizing, a public procession in a prohibited area. Walking to the Istana They do not need a head nor do they want a tail. They are all heads, all eyes, all mouths, all legs, all hands, umbrellas up against the onslaught of the sun. They are cool, and young as the crescent moon lighting up lovers' rendezvous and drinking parties and the unworldly debates of secret handshakes. They know of others who also walked such roads, when buses were divided into front and back, when a state was crossed to pick up a handful of salt. They understand they can easily be replaced by those coming up behind them, even younger, smarter, and stronger,...

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here .  Congratulations to  Rahad Abir  for winning the Georgia Author of the Year Award for literary fiction! We're so proud of you! Past winners include Malcolm Tariq, Ruby Lal, and Natasha Trethewey. The award citation reads: " Bengal Hound  is authentic and complex, and the storytelling skills on display here are impressive. At times the narrative becomes tight and abrupt, a mirror of what is happening with the protagonist. Overall, this is a vividly imagined, smartly edited novel. " At its very core a story of love and loss,  Bengal Hound  traces the turbulent years of East Pakistan that led to a mass revolution, eventually culminating in the creation of Bangladesh. Rahad Abir conjures up characters haunted by memory and trauma in a society reeling from the pains of the Partition of British India. A powerful exploration of the dynamics of nationalism, family, religion, and gender relat...

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here .   Gaudy Boy is proud to publish this astonishing story collection  The Way You Want To Be Loved , by Aruni Kashyap. It is praised by Amitav Ghosh as "poignant, finely crafted." We think you will love it as much as we do. At a New Delhi conference, an Assamese writer is interrogated on why he writes about magical folktales instead of the insurgencies. A mother splashes around in the village lake to mask the lovemaking sounds of her son with another man. A newly-arrived graduate student in Minnesota navigates living arrangements with his white roommate, Mike, and Mike’s Indian girlfriend.  In agile and frank prose,  The Way You Want to Be Loved  tells the stories of queer, displaced lives from India’s Northeast, an underrepresented region in English fiction. A hybrid cast of characters represents the common people in these thirteen stories, whether western-trained academic or village s...

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . The Straits Times, Singapore's main broadsheet,  reported  that some Singaporean parents are not sending their children to the US for college because of the ongoing campus protests. One student told the newspaper, "My parents dissuaded me from attending a university in the US because they felt I might get influenced by the culture to protest and get into trouble." A PSA to these parents: Your children do not have to leave Singapore to learn to engage responsibly with the world. Last Friday, 40 students and alumni of Singaporean institutes of higher learning delivered 40 letters to the Ministry of Home Affairs opposing the newly proposed Maintenance of Racial Harmony Bill.  Their letter , a model of reason and clarity even if you don't agree with their stance, deserves an answer from the Ministry. It also shows clearly how student activism around Israel/Gaza has broadened to a critique of cens...