Goanet Digest, Vol 21, Issue 76

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Today's Topics:

   1. Read: "A low-grade fever, a relentless sadness: Being Muslim
      [Christian] in the New India that is Bharat (Vivek Pinto)
   2. Read: "The roots of India?s disinterest in reading" (Vivek Pinto)


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Message: 1
Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2026 18:29:05 +0900
From: Vivek Pinto <[email protected]>
To: Goanet <[email protected]>
Subject: [Goanet] Read: "A low-grade fever, a relentless sadness:
	Being Muslim [Christian] in the New India that is Bharat
Message-ID:
	<CAH3OY9wkBVkUCb=-uyN9jB5V7dSmBmOU4npwVfowysiUtYSxRQ-JsoAwUIsXosN+BqQ9rBEUg@public.gmane.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"

By: Rakhshanda Jalil [Rakhshanda Jalil is a writer, translator and literary
historian.]
Published in: *Scroll*
Date: February 14, 2026
Source:
https://scroll.in/article/1090719/a-low-grade-fever-a-relentless-sadness-being-muslim-in-the-new-india-that-is-bharat
This fear that rubs away insidiously at the idea of belonging must at least
be acknowledged.*This is a lightly edited version of the author?s keynote
address delivered at the inauguration of the 14th Goa Arts and Literature
Festival on February 12.*
Each time I come to the Goa Arts and Literature Festival, I am struck anew
by the manner in which this festival continues to create a space for voices
from the margins and explore ?ways of belonging?.

The idea of identity, of belonging, has shaped much of my recent work. At
the same time, I am also concerned about the dark underbelly of belonging,
the forces of othering that are gathering like dark clouds over our
country. On this glorious day, in this wonderful setting , it seems strange
to talk about fear and I thought long and hard whether I should or not, but
then I decided if not at GALF where else can one speak one?s mind, where
else can one speak of one?s deepest, darkest fears?

I want to talk about fear, a fear that is very real for very many of us,
one that rubs away insidiously at the idea of belonging. While I will
mostly talk about the fear that Muslims in India feel, I know that fear is
shared by many ? by other minorities in India, by communities who find
themselves on the margins and many from the majority community who sense
and share this fear, some of whom gather in echo chambers to vent ?gham
ghalat karna [divert one's mind from grief, sorrow, or worries to feel
better]?, as it is referred to in Urdu.

I must confess to a crushing fear, one that weighs my chest with an
inexorable weight and makes it difficult to breathe sometimes. Yes, with
all my privileges ? of education, of class, of having friends in ?high
places? ? I feel scared, more scared than I have ever been in my entire
life. I must also confess to an almost persistent depression, like a
low-grade fever, over the past few years, that doesn?t quite halt the daily
rhythm of life; it just slows you down by its continuous, relentless
presence in your life making you feel sad and somehow empty, as though a
great deal that one has taken for granted all one?s adult life is like sand
slipping through one?s fingers.

I suspect I am not alone in this. I feel this fear and depression among a
great many Muslims in urban India. I hear it in their silences. I sense it
in their steadfast refusal to get drawn into political debates. I notice it
in their stoicism in the face of virulent hate swirling about in school and
college WhatsApp groups as well as RWA/housing society group chats. I spot
it in the hastily withdrawn social media posts drawing attention to some
recent communal outrage or atrocity. I recognise it in their zeal to
distance themselves from instances of any sort of violence, be it a Muslim
man killing his Hindu girlfriend and chopping her into pieces or a Muslim
man killing his non-Muslim partner in a business dispute ? where the
perpetrator, not the victim, is a Muslim.

If my own fear and despair, and that of others like me, is so palpable and
pronounced, what of those Muslims who are doubly marginalised by their
poverty and illiteracy? Or vulnerable because they don?t have the
safeguards and barriers, however flimsy, that ?people like us? have in our
gated communities and cushioned lives? What of those who live on the edge
of survival because they must perforce go out into the real world every
single day to eke out a living? What of the plumbers, electricians,
painters, carpenters, maids and sundry service providers who don?t give
their real, Muslim-sounding names for fear they will not be hired? Or the
vegetable vendors who festoon their carts with saffron flags after every
call to boycott small Muslim businesses? Or the biryani vendors, kabab
sellers, quilt makers, car mechanics who have traditionally plied these
trades for generations but now fear for their lives? What of the meat
sellers whose makeshift stalls happen to be along the routes taken by the
kawariyas during every monsoon? What of the imams and naib imams, often
from the poorest of families, who are hired by Waqf boards to serve as
custodians of small, isolated mosques often surrounded by hostile
neighbours?

I don?t ?look? like a Muslim so, to an extent, I am safe. I have written a
book with the same title ? *But You Don?t Look Like a Muslim *and I was
invited some years ago to discuss it here at GALF. Unless called out to
chant ?Jai Shree Ram? to profess my Indianness, I am largely safe. But what
of my name? How can I camouflage that? Or hide it when asked to provide
proof of identity? While my first name can afford some benefit of doubt for
it might pass as a Parsi?s, my surname is a dead give-away. When push comes
to shove in the New India that is Bharat, not even speaking English will
give me an exit pass if a mob baying for Muslim blood were to gherao me.
All my so-called privileges can be brought to naught by a crowd of lumpens.
The realisation is chilling.

And if I were a man? Imagine, over 75 years after Partition and after
reading all the gory stories penned by Saadat Hasan Manto and other
chroniclers of communal violence, having your pants pulled down to check
whether you are a ?*katua *[circumcised]? or not? But what if I did ?look?
like a Muslim? What if I chose to offer namaz perfectly peacefully and
quietly while sitting on my berth in a train? Worse still, what if I had a
beard, wore a topi or a hijab and indeed ?looked? like a Muslim?

You might recall the incident that happened on a train to Mumbai when a
railway protection officer shot dead three people in August 2023. What if I
worked as an imam in a mosque? So what if I had just assured my family that
all was well, that I was safe given the police presence all around me?
What, then?

What if I, as an Indian, have been conditioned to believe that the tattered
fabric of secularism will be held up no matter what? The violence in
Gurgaon, also in July-August 2023, proved that these are no longer
hypothetical scenarios. This is a lived reality for countless Indian
Muslims. It gets an impetus when the chief minister of a state urges his
people to ?trouble the miyas? and to actively underpay them for services
such as plying rickshaws. He goes on to post videos from his party?s
official X handle ? since deleted ? showing Muslims being shot at point
blank range

And there are other instances:


*Jab mulle kaate jaaingeRam Ram chillainge*

*["When Muslims are slaughtered/chopped up. They will scream: Ram, Ram]*

Or:

?
*Hindustan mein rehna hogaJai Shri Ram kehna hoga?*

*[?If you live in India, you will have to say: Victory to Shri Ram.]*

And ?*Goli maro saalon ko* [shoot the bastards] ? by someone who is now a
Union minister are no longer isolated instances of random, unrelated,
personal biases and prejudices. They are dog whistles. They are a clarion
call to a large, restive majority that is being brain-washed to believe
they are second-class, nay ?seventh-class? citizens, in their own land.
They are part of a larger narrative, a grand design.

Since we have clearly turned into a nation of ?whatabouters?, each of these
hate-filled, terror-inducing slogans are instantly and viciously countered
with those raised by the PFI [Popular Front of India] or other fringe
minority outfits. When rapes, murders, corruptions, scams and scandals are
thwarted in Parliament by elected representatives of the people by
instances of whatabouts, how can these rising incidents of bigotry and hate
not be similarly countered? It?s easier to come back with
counter-accusations, to point fingers, to obfuscate, to fling more filth,
to parry hate with hate than it is to understand fear, to acknowledge
militant, muscular majoritarianism, to call out the elephant in the room.

As we spiral inexorably downwards, as every fresh instance of bigotry is
outstripped and outdone by even bigger, bolder, more blatant, more
bare-faced occurrences, we don?t seem to pause to think of the
consequences. This rampant whataboutery ? both at the political and the
individual level ? is exhausting, predictable and eventually empty. It will
derail the India we have known and loved ? probably forever.

What we are witnessing today is a creeping normality (also called
gradualism, or landscape amnesia), a process by which a major change comes
to be accepted as ?normal?, even ?acceptable? if it happens slowly through
small, often unnoticeable, increments of change. A change that might
otherwise be viewed as objectionable if it were to take place in a single
step or short period is seen as quite all right ? as some of us of a
certain age can bear witness to the slow-building horror of the past few
decades.

I don?t quite believe that one way of life ended in 2014 and another began
in May 2014. No, I believe localised, small, seemingly insignificant
events, beginning with the country-wide Rath Yatra of 1990 have kept adding
a layer of ?normal? till we have reached this stage of the New Normal where
blatant bigotry, bare-faced communalism and publicly-aired prejudices are
considered perfectly all right.

I will come back to the fear I began with. From this platform today, all I
am asking for is an acknowledgement of this fear, a fear that I have about
being a Muslim in India today. A fear that is shared ? in different ways
and in different degrees ? not just by Muslims but by other minority
groups, by adivasis, by LGBT communities, in fact by large numbers of those
who are sneeringly referred to as LIBTARDS.

Many of you may not fully understand this fear, some might dismiss it as
part of a victim syndrome, an exaggerated sense of harbouring a grievance,
of wanting to wallow in self pity, a tendency to focus on the negatives; a
handful among you might even accuse me of fear mongering. To you I say, try
any one of these simple experiments: Walk into a Barista and announce your
name as Salman or Salma or, for that matter, Umar Khalid or even Sharjeel
Imam; wave off a friend or relative at a train station or airport by
announcing ?*Khuda Hafiz* [May God protect you]?; go about your day as you
would ordinarily with one single addition ? wear a skull cap ? as the Delhi
journalist Mayank Austen Soofi did and recorded the chilling consequences;
or do as I did on my flight from Delhi to Goa ? read a book in Urdu in
public. Try it.

However, it would be a sad day if one were to give in to fear or simply
feel sorry for oneself. I am not a politician or an activist. I am only a
writer. Words are all I have and I want to use them as tools in the only
way a writer can: I can bear witness, I can speak up, I can record and
chronicle both for the present and for posterity.

To come back to fear, its only antidote, I do believe, is empathy,
cultivating the ability to say, I am not you, but I see you, I hear you.
Remember these lines from *To Kill a Mocking Bird*, ?You never really
understand a person until you consider things from his point of view until
you climb into his skin and walk around in it.?

*Rakhshanda Jalil is a writer, translator and literary historian.*


------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2026 18:31:29 +0900
From: Vivek Pinto <[email protected]>
To: Goanet <[email protected]>
Subject: [Goanet] Read: "The roots of India?s disinterest in reading"
Message-ID:
	<CAH3OY9x6mKZJhmb7NzOH25+PcEfcxKnCjmq_v9hbc31OXaiDpw-JsoAwUIsXosN+BqQ9rBEUg@public.gmane.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"

By: Aporvanand
Published in: *Scroll*
Date: February 13, 2026
Source:
https://scroll.in/article/1090684/the-roots-of-indias-disinterest-in-reading
A public that prefers to passively consume videos and reels is the natural
outcome of an education system which devalues original thought and
expression.

The outrage that followed a report in *The Guardian* this week about the
absence of a reading culture
<https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/feb/09/books-india-literature-festivals-readers>
 in India reminded me of a conversation with the editor of an online Hindi
journal. With palpable sadness, he said the reports published on the portal
often go unread.

To labour over these pieces, to bring them to light amidst chronic
financial distress, is an ordeal that only those embedded in the struggle
can comprehend. Long before the writer?s fingers touch the keyboard, there
is the gruelling labour of groundwork, meticulous research and the ethical
burden of verification and investigation. For this exhausting toil, writers
are not even paid adequately.

Then comes the secondary labour of editing, managed by a skeletal team.
Yet, they have persisted with a quiet defiance, publishing dispatches that
the well-funded, corporate behemoths of the press would hesitate to touch.

It is disheartening to analyse the digital metrics and realise these
efforts remain largely ignored. However, a curious and painful irony
emerges: when these same reports are translated into English, the
readership multiplies manifold. This disparity only deepens the wound for
those who commit their intellectual lives to the original language ? in
this instance, Hindi.

According to my editor friend, the contemporary public prefers the passive
consumption of video over the active engagement required by a report or an
essay. This mirrors our own experience. In various settings, we encounter
people who tell us, ?I have seen you.? Rarely does one hear the
affirmation, ?I have read you.?

Perhaps, one might argue, my own writing is not worth the reader?s time ?
that is a separate matter. This trend reflects a systemic erosion. While
sharing this experience with a young journalist, he smiled, taking pity on
me, and said that now even videos are past. This is the age of reels.

I once met a young man in a library who recognised me from my videos. When
he introduced himself, I found out that he was my student, rarely seen in
the classroom. He spends his hours in the library, not for the love of
books, but to prepare for competitive examinations. There is a specific
industry of books manufactured for these exams and that he reads. He cannot
afford to waste time on a classroom lecture or a nuanced dialogue. It
offers no utility for the competitive market.

This exodus from the classroom is a crisis engineered by universities and
the regulators of higher education. Whether at the master?s or PhD level,
entrance examinations have degenerated into exercises of factual recall: it
has reached a point of absolute absurdity with students expected to
memorise the colour of a character?s cap or the shade of their shoes.

Literature, whether a novel or a poem, has been reduced to a warehouse of
trivia. Because classroom discussions eschew these minute, sterile details
in favour of critical inquiry, classes are rendered irrelevant to the
student?s immediate survival.

This pathology begins in school. The classroom functions under the crushing
weight of the examination board. Most exams no longer require the student
to compose a coherent thought, they need only provide a few isolated words.
Even in secondary education, the fact-based query reigns supreme. Teachers,
consequently, do not insist on reading the entire text but emphasise the
?important? fragments.

The result is a generation that reads only what is ?compulsory?. The
transformative experience of reading a short story in its entirety, or
navigating the architecture of a whole book, is steadily vanishing.

This crisis extends far beyond literature to science, history, and
political science, each with their own unique linguistic registers. Yet,
even in these disciplines, a chapter is rarely read from start to finish.
The ?objective? question has abolished the necessity of the sentence.

I feel my editor friend?s sorrow acutely because, as a teacher, this is a
battle I engage in every day. Each semester is a struggle just to persuade
students to bring a physical book to class. They do not see the necessity
of engaging with the text. Beyond the absence of reflective or critical
writing, there is the refusal to finish a novel or an essay, even. I often
tell them: what others pursue as a hobby is your chosen profession ? what
could be more fortunate? Yet, they lack the patience to journey from the
first page to the last. Reading was never cultivated as a prized activity
in their formative years.

This has a symbiotic relationship with the degradation of writing. Students
are not expected to articulate their own thoughts in their own language.
The Central Board for Secondary Education, perhaps the most influential
school board in the country, instructs examiners to evaluate students
against ?model answers?. Any deviation, any spark of original expression,
results in less marks.

This explains why students often admit, with a certain sadness, that they
find original texts heavy or difficult. Every semester ends with the regret
that teachers could not persuade students to engage with more than a couple
of essays by Hindi authors such as Agyeya, Muktibodh or Premchand. This
struggle repeats itself, year after academic year.

A research scholar once told me that students now ?understand? novels by
watching summaries in the library. These videos provide a skeletal plot,
stripped of its soul. Why endure the trouble of reading? Thus, the library
has become a theatre for video consumption. Competitive exams for
employment ? and university entrances ? have reduced literary work to a
heap of information, from an encounter with the totality of language.

Even the definition of the library has mutated. A foreign observer visiting
the Hindi heartland might see boards announcing libraries at every corner
and imagine a flourishing culture of reading. But these spaces are merely
holding pens for exam preparation. The youth flock there for the Wi-Fi and
desk space, rather than a love for reading.

The erosion of reading is, fundamentally, an erosion of our democratic
character. When we read, we do not merely consume content, but encounter a
distinctive voice, a unique manner of expression. The idea is important,
yes, but the gesture, the style and the linguistic texture are equally
vital. The true struggle of a writer is to achieve a language that is more
than a mere vehicle for information. One rarely reads the work of an author
only because they find an alignment with their politics.

A summary, lacking personality, can never substitute for the book. This
understanding must be nurtured in school; by the time a student reaches
their master?s level of education, the habits of the mind have already
ossified into a lasting regret.

There is another silence regarding Hindi that must be broken. In ?Hindi?
regions, Hindi is rarely the first language of the people. It coexists with
Bhojpuri, Awadhi, Maithili and others. It is a language that must be
consciously acquired. For the majority, it is only a transactional tool.
Census data is misleading too. In the rush to inflate the number of ?Hindi
speakers?, individuals register it as their mother tongue, erasing their
true linguistic origins. The refusal to recognise this fact leads to a
flawed pedagogy of language.

Schools emphasise a sterile purity and correctness in Hindi, rather than
its beauty or its pluralistic soul. This clinical approach fails to endear
the language to the student. There is no bond of affection between the
reader and the language.

How can one learn to appreciate the craft and the care required in
language? Only by reading the masters. Too often, in contemporary Hindi
prose, one realises that writers do care for their ideology but are mostly
indifferent to the language they inhabit and practise. There are precious
few writers today whom one would read for the sheer grace of their
sentences. What is the value of a story if it adds nothing to one?s
experience of the world of language?

But as I write this, the nagging doubt creeps in: who will read these
words? And why should they?

*Apoorvanand teaches Hindi in Delhi University.*


End of Goanet Digest, Vol 21, Issue 76
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