Our World Is a Family
Literature, Wisdom and Going Forward to Make Humanity More Sustainable, Inspired by Fratelli Tutti
ayaṃ nijaḥ paro veti gaṇanā laghucetasām
udāracaritānāṃ tu vasudhaiva kuṭumbakam
One is a relative, the other stranger, say the small minded.
The entire world is a family, live the magnanimous.
Be detached, large of heart, lift your mind,
Enjoy the fruit of Brahminic freedom. (Maha Upanishad 6.71–75)
Abstract: Inspired by Pope Francis’ Fratelli Tutti and drawing from different traditions of literature and religions, the poet and journalist, reflects on living together in a spirit of diversity and harmony. He learns from the great Sufi mystic Shams of Tabriz who sought to answer that question in the all-pervading oneness of the spirit. He also acknowledges that the human mind alone is the refuge of both vice and virtue. The ancients believed that by submerging itself in its own exalted state, the mind can rid itself of all its virtues and vices that are accumulations of wrong teachings. The author argues that it is only discovering the divine not high up in the heavens above, but deep within their hearts; it is only in realising that God in our hearts, do we realise the beauty of our being. This is true for both believers and non-believers for people of different and no religions. So, the author concludes the article pleading for love beyond limits, beauty in everything and unity in plurality.
Keywords: Fratelli Tutti, Lennon, Sufi mystics, Swami Vivekananda, Pope Francis, Mother Teresa, Shakespeare, Lal Ded, Lev Tolstoy, Rabindranath Tagore, Cabuliwallah, Habibi.
On a dry hot day in May 2021, heralding the onset of summer, the world woke up to the horror on television screens of hundreds of thousands of bloated corpses wrapped in white shrouds, garlanded in marigold, floating along the banks of India’s holiest of holy rivers, Ganga.
The Covid-19 pandemic, that had been uncorked well over a year-and-a half ago in the wet markets of Wuhan in China selling game meat, had made its ultimate statement …
The virus was sparing no one …
The richest of the rich in the ancient city of modern Rome… and,
The poorest of the poor, in the ancient villages of rural India.
And we, mere mortals, were being devoured as game by an unseen, unheard, untouched, non-living creature of dispassionate zeal bent on demolishing the civilizational foundations of one nation after another, uprooting faiths, coded over centuries, from their spiritual moorings.
The spirit of the wild had finally come alive, claiming the spirit of us, the tamed.
Sadly, for India, when the country needed its Mother Teresa moment to bring succour to the dying destitute, its citizens were rejoicing their dead instead, in a partisan game of one-upmanship in a nation tearing apart, thread by thread from the warp and weft of its cultural tapestry that had dressed its civilisation in the fabric of oneness over millennia.
The Hindus, word went out, were finally rotting in hell, by the riverbank, in a country they insisted was their own alone, flying the saffron flag to future. And now, that saffron had turned into the noose of marigold, denying victims their final rite of passage. Hardly did the collective consciousness of a nation trapped in hate, pause to ponder that day that a dead body, no matter to whom it belonged, and no matter how sacred or desecrated, how rich or poor, had to go through the putrefying process whether claimed by earth or water or air, before merging with the elements.
And yet, for those who pondered, the significance of words of a much-loved monk in distant Vatican, not so long ago, could never be more insightful than now.
“The way the Covid-19 pandemic was managed by world countries has shown the failure in global cooperation … their inability to work together, became quite evident. For all our hyper connectivity, we witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all,” Pope Francis, father of the Roman Catholic Church, had lamented almost eight months earlier about the pandemic that had gripped the world. (FT 7)
He was challenging the way we live our faith, demanding a change in our outlook of living, theologising and being.
Simply said, the Holy Father was demanding a paradigm shift in our culture born of othering and hate, fragmented by unreason, in favour of a higher universal call? (FT 38, 191)
“What then is culture?” A young poet once asked an ageing journalist in a long engagement on Hindu-Muslim divide in the Age of Hindutva seeking to cast 21st century India in the image of its once free and glorious past.
The point, said the journalist, is that humans are political animals. Somewhere down the road of history, culture, religion, and politics got intertwined. And there was a sudden shift in discourse with all three coming into the picture.
So, where did culture start?
And how did it get defined?
And when did the original signposts of culture begin?
Culture probably started when the caveman moved out on hunt and coloured his face with soot and ashes from his hearth. And that war paint not only scared the hell out of the other, but also defined the caveman as what he was not ... yet, he did it. Because the caveman was scared.
And that face paint made way for the mask.
And the mask, as you know, is theatrical.
And the theatre is the ritual.
And so, the mask became god.
And so, the ritual became religion.
“Religious people tend to be more blinkered,” said the young poet …
“To make ourselves believe and make others believe who we are not,” nodded the journalist.
And that’s the beginning of culture ...
Therefore, culture is an artificial construct to present to the world what we are not.
Culture is acquired ... it’s not inherited like our memory.
“I don’t believe in Hindu culture. Or Muslim. Or Christian, for that matter. I do not believe in Indian culture. Or American. Though the ethnic mix within a spatial contour does define our collective memory, and therefore, our DNA, over millennia,” said the scribe.
Somewhat!
Yet, if there must be a culture to define who we are ... it must necessarily be the universal code of one.
The culture of, say, Michael Jackson, that makes everybody across age
groups and language divides dance to an all-embracing beat.
The culture of, say, Messi, that unites the world in joyful cheer.
It must then be …
The culture of Rumi.
The culture of Nanak.
The culture of Francis.
The culture of Chaitanya.
The culture of Tolstoy.
The culture of Tagore.
The cultural of Gibran.
The culture that is so deeply ingrained in your psyche, that you uphold and seek to define it in different tongues, across various narratives. It is certainly not what we say here and now that we seem to have redefined, somewhere along this journey, because of the way we perceive our surroundings.
Perhaps!
Culture, if there were one, is one that must necessarily allow us to accept the other as our own. The one that makes a Lennon so dear to us, no matter where we belong. And a Shah Rukh Khan our hero for all times to come, no matter what name he sports on the silver screen.
“I agree with all of this,” said the poet, “but the world isn’t as you see it.”
“That’s why I seek to redefine the world with more than a little help from you,” replied the journalist.
“I would never ever root for a tyrant. Whether from my culture or not,” said the poet.
“Neither would I,” responded the journalist.
“Culture is also what u grow up with. No matter what your religion,” said the poet.
“We grow up with many things. Yet above all else, we must never grow up to hate one other,” said the ageing journalist. (Roy, 2023)
How does that happen in a Universe where stars born in the same galactic crucible are programmed to move away from another over time and distance?” (Sagan, 2013)
The great Sufi Mystic, Shams of Tabriz, sought to answer that question in the all-pervading oneness of the spirit.
“Some of the sages say that the spirit is eternal. Some say that it is ‘newly arrived’ – that is, at first, it was not, then it came to be. Nonetheless, it’s quite some time since there was the togetherness of the spirits. The spirits are ranked troops. However, this togetherness is of different sorts. The tavern-goers have a togetherness, as do workers of corruption. But here I am speaking of the togetherness that is with the spirit. God’s knowledge encompasses all.
But this togetherness is with God. Surely, God is with those who are god-fearing. He also says, Surely God is with us. So, if at the beginning of his created nature the spirit of the Tatar had been familiar with us in that togetherness, right now he would be familiar with us, and with Imad as well.
God addressed that togetherness: ‘I am going to bring into existence the viceregent of water and clay, and I am going to make you his progeny in the world of water and clay.’
They said, ‘our God, we are at ease with You in this world of togetherness. We fear that we will become scattered and remain far from this.’
He said, ‘I know that you do not speak these words by way of protest and discourtesy. So, seek refuge in me, and fear lest your togetherness be scattered. You should know that I am perfect in power. My power has no effect. In your very clothing and veil, I will gather you and I will give you familiarity and togetherness with each other.’
Beyond the world of water and clay, after the mountain of the Unseen, we were mixed like Gog and Magog. All of a sudden, we rose up from there and came down to the call Fall down! From far away we saw the outline of the province of existence. From afar, the outskirts of the city and the trees were not apparent. In the same way, during infancy we saw nothing of this world. Little by little that came about. The harm of the bait and the trap gradually came forth to us. The flavour of that bait overcame the suffering of the trap. Otherwise, existence would have been impossible.” (Chittick, 2004)
Some six-hundred-and fifty years later, that coming together of the spirit in this eponymous conversation between Shams ad-Din (Shams) of Tabriz (Iran) and Mavlana Jalal ad-Din (Rumi) of Konya (Turkey) found new expression in India when the country’s first Nobel laureate and India’s national bard, Rabindranath Tagore, scripted the endearing story of an Afghan dry fruits peddler Abdurrahman and his five-year-old Bengali soulmate Mini, bridging a centuries-old cultural divide between a passive Hindu heartland and the aggressive Muslim frontier on the far northwest of India’s border.
“I was hard at work … when all of a sudden, Mini left her play, and ran to the window crying: ‘A Cabuliwallah! a Cabuilwallah!’
I cannot tell what were my daughter’s feelings at the sight of this man, but she began to call him loudly... At which exact moment the Cabuliwallah turned, and looked up the child. When she saw this, overcome by terror, she fled to her mother’s protection, and disappeared. She had a blind belief that inside the bag, which the big man carried, there were perhaps two or three children like herself. The peddler meanwhile entered my doorway and greeted me with a smiling face …
I made some purchases, and a conversation began about Abdurrahman, the Russians, the English, and the Frontier Policy.
And as he was about to leave, he asked: ‘And where is the little girl, sir?’
And I, thinking that Mini must get rid of her false fear, had her brought out.
She stood by my chair and looked at the Cabuliwallah and his bag. He offered her nuts and raisins, but she would not be tempted, and only clung closer to me, with all her doubts increased.
This was their first meeting.
One morning, however, not many days later, as I was leaving the house, I was startled to find Mini, seated on a bench near the door, laughing and talking with the great Cabuliwallah at her feet. In all her life, it appeared, my small daughter had never found so patient a listener …” (Tagore, 2003).
And so, we too, each one of us, have a ‘listener’, who knows that far removed from the Tower of Babel, the voices in our hearts must dissolve to make sense of our being.
“I realised that on my rounds of some of Delhi’s best hospitals in search of a trustworthy doctor, last month. Do you know what I saw there?” the ageing journalist quizzed the young poet.
I saw countless Afghans, Iraqis, Yemenis with amputated legs, some Pakistanis, some Iranians too. Men in salwar, women in burqas. Some in need of urgent blood transfusion, some kidney or liver transplants, and many, in need of interventions of the heart.
All staring at hope.
They were not as educated as the entitled custodians of our faith. But they knew a thing or two about the heart. And how the red dye effortlessly dissolves once it flows through a different vein. I asked a couple of them, including one from Pakistan, whether it mattered if they were being administered Hindu or Christian or Parsi or Jewish blood, for there was no way of checking the source.
Their answers will bewilder privileged scholars of human behaviour, for all of them without exception said, ‘Insaan ek hai; sab Allah ke bandey (All mankind is one; all buddies of Allah)!” (Roy, 2023)
So, that’s Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan for you. Man fighting man, for no reason, to reclaim his uncertain past for his certain future: Death!
That’s also the Great War of Kurukshetra.
That’s also Asoka’s conquest of Kalinga.
That’s also the colonisation of India by Babur, claiming 20,000 war dead at Panipat alone.
That’s also the Great Bengal Famine of the Raj of 1943 that not only claimed up to 3 million lives, but also impoverished so many millions more for decades to come that, before long, a Mother Teresa had to emerge to bring succor to the dead in their moment of living.
That’s also the vanity of man.
You hear an echo of that voice in nineteenth century Russian realist Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy’s commentary on his magnum opus, Some Words about War and Peace: “Why did millions of men kill each other, when everyone has known since the beginning of time that it is morally and physically wrong to do so? Because the thing was so inevitable that in doing so, they were obeying the same elementary zoological law as the bees when they kill each other in the autumn, and all male animals who exterminate each other.” (Cited in Troyat, 2001: 312)
This inevitability should have stared us in the face when the dead came floating down the Ganga last summer, overwhelmed by the ineptitude of the living. Humans, simply had to die, because the virus happened to claim them. For once in every one-hundred years or so, an unknown, unseen virus descends upon mankind to claim millions, even as science makes rapid strides to exterminate the one that came before. And yet, in the floating dead, as much in the living who floats, Tolstoy painted an eye-opener in the fullness of us all in the nothingness of being:
“War breaks out (in 1805). The problems of each are swept away by the problem of all. History puts an end to stories. The Russian army invades Austria. Bloody battles are fought, as futile as they are inevitable … In action Prince Andrey feels strangely relieved to be borne along by a flood over which he has no control… Wounded at Austerlitz, Prince Andrey has a revelation of the absurdity and purposelessness of life. Lying on his back, he sees above him ‘a sky that was somehow vague, but very far and high, immensely high, in which grey clouds were drifting.’ And he says to himself, ‘How calm and peaceful, how majestic … Everything is vain, everything is false, except this boundless sky. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, except that …” (Troyat, 2001)
And in this flight of fancy…
“Some run away from home.
Some escape the hermitage.
No orchard bears fruit for the barren mind.
Day and night, count the rosary of your hand,
and stay put wherever you are.
Hermit or householder: same difference.
If you’ve dissolved your desires in the river of time,
you will see the Lord is everywhere and is perfect.
As you know, so shall you be.
Some, who have closed their eyes, are wide awake.
Some who look out at the world, are fast asleep.
Some who bathe in sacred pools remain dirty.
Some are at home in the world but keep their hands clean.
Those who glow with the light of the Self
are freed from life even while they live.
But fools add knots by the hundred
to the tangled net of the world (Lalla, 2013).
Thus spake Lal Ded, a female mystic, and Kashmir’s 14th century wandering minstrel, claimed equally by both the Muslim and the Hindu as their own in a land they are now busy tearing apart with hatred.
In this sacred space of oneness, where is the scope for the other?
More aptly where is the space for the other?
Which brings us back to the purpose of this prose in the spirit of Fratelli Tutti (FT). Writing of his namesake St. Francis of Assisi (1181-1226), the Pope wrote, “Of the counsels Francis offered, I would like to select the one in which he calls for a love that transcends the barriers of geography and distance and declares blessed all those who love their brother ‘as much as when he is far away from him as when he is with him.’
St. Francis expressed the essence of a fraternal openness that allows us to acknowledge, appreciate and love each other person, regardless of physical proximity, regardless of where he or she was born or lives. (FT 4)
Some 800 years ago, when Sufi mystic Nizamuddin Auliya was sowing the seeds of love in Delhi right under the nose of seven successive Turkic despots, St. Francis preached for the cessation of all forms of hostility or conflict in distant France and Italy, and even journeyed to Cairo seeking an end to the Crusade, insisting, instead, that a humble and fraternal ‘subjection’ be shown to those who did not share his faith.
Francis did not wage a war of words… “He did inspire the vision of fraternal society.” (FT 4)
Centuries later, St. Francis’ doctrine of brotherhood found resonance in the words of Swami Vivekananda, in his now famous address at the Chicago conference on 11 September 1893.
“Sisters and brothers of America,” the Swami exclaimed, to thunderous applause, bringing his faith and civilization to the new world…
“It fills my heart with joy unspeakable to rise in response to the warm and cordial welcome which you have given us. I thank you in the name of the most ancient order of monks in the world, I thank you in the name of the mother of religion, and I thank you in the name of millions of Hindu people of all classes and sects …
I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and acceptance. We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true. I am proud to belong to a nation which has sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of all religions and all nations of the earth…
I quote to you brethren, a few lines from a hymn which I remember to have repeated from my earliest boyhood, which is repeated by millions of human beings: “As the different streams having their sources in different places all mingle their water in the sea, so, O Lord, the different paths which men take through different tendencies, various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to Thee.” (Vivekananda, 1907)
And in this one world, bridging 5,000 years of continuous human civilisation on a lush green expanse on the Ganga, flushed by a thousand streams, flowing into the sea all at once, the Sufis sang their own song of nihilism, exterminating the self in love of ‘the other’.
My Love you too!
My love you are, my buddy you too
My religion you are, my faith you too
My body you are, my soul you too
My warmth you are, my life you too
My Ka’abah, qibla, mosque you are,
And steps leading to them you too
My Quran you are, my rights you too
My duties and pilgrimage you too
My doles and prayer you are
My piety too, my piety too
My knowledge …
Remembrance, contemplation
Delight,
Ecstasy and love you are
My light you too, my hope you too
My desires, gains, setbacks you too
You are all I see around,
My pride you are, my deliverance too
My faith and honour you are
My glory and shame you too
My sorrows, joys, tears and toys
My illness and remedies you too
The reason I sleep you are
My beauty, fame, luck, fortune you too.
It’s you I seek now …
And forever search
The known, knowing, knowledge you too
The chill of my breath you are
The storm of my tears you too
My mole you are, my hair you are
My pride, my glow-up you too
My tattoo and mascara you are
My gum, tobacco and hash you too
My loneliness, excitement, craze you are
My tear too, my grief you too
You are my beginning, my end you are
My hidden revelation that too you too
You are my thunder, my rain you too
My land beloved, scorching desert
My rivulet and sand dunes you too
O Beloved, you take me, The One,
My sovereign you shall be then too
My Sultan then shall be you too
My bass rhythm and string apart
My destination you are, my destiny too. (Roy, 2023; Juejo, 2002)
At the opposite end of this universal oneness, a poet and dramatist in pre-modern England, William Shakespeare (1564-1616), split this unity of spirit into duality of thought to uphold the oneness of being. This was to become the hallmark of many of his sonnets and plays.
Let me confess that we two
Must be twain
Although our undivided loves are one:
So shall those blots that do with me remain,
Without help, by me borne alone
In our two loves there is one respect,
Though in our lives a separate spite,
Which, though it alter not love’s sole effect,
Yet doth it steal sweet hours from love’s delight.
I may not evermore acknowledge thee
Lest my bewailed guilt should do the shame,
Nor thou with public kindness honour me
Unless thou take that honour from my name:
But do to so; I love thee in such sort
As thou being mine, mine is thy good report (Shakespeare, 2014).
As poet and author Linda Sue Grimes puts it in her commentary on the structuring of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 36, this merging into the other is “a natural fundamental unity binding the three components of creation: the creator, the act of creating, and the resulting created entity ... Yet, within this paradigm also exists the phenomenon of duality versus unity, where two aspects of creation may work together or against each other. When duality becomes the focus, the nature of the relationship between the creator and the created comes into play (Grimes, 2021).
On a larger canvas, however, the dramatisation of this separation of unity gets painted in communal tints of ‘us versus them’. Over centuries this separation has manifested in the rupture between the individual and the institution, as evident from the caveman’s face paint, subverting the accepted arbitrary authority, leading to the excommunication of the other and, in the process, scripting the theatre of the absurd by pitching one against its multiple dead images on the banks of the Ganga, where invocations of sacred love make way for invectives born out of hatred.
And that theatre has mimicked the tragedy right since the time of the Greek dramas down to the age of Shakespeare culminating in the story of Romeo and Juliet where two rival clans finally unite in the death of their children.
But then, is sacrifice of the one for the other a pre-requisite of the unity of one in all?
Do people have to die so that the living may arise?
Authors of Indian wisdom literature (among them, Yoga Vasistha and Ashtavakra Gita) maintain that our obsession with the other, as much with the dead, are products of a derailed mind that visualises Truth in fragments.
“Drawing on the imagery of a charioteer driving his chariot, Indic philosophers projected the body as the chariot, the mind the rein, the intellect the charioteer, the senses the horses, and the subject the tract on which the chariot races.
They went on to dwell on the nature of the mind that moves at amazing speeds, pursuing pleasures in dead bodies, that is in perishable material objects, and is deluded by the opposites of attachment-anger, love-hate, profit-loss, and birth-death.
And so, the mind is shaped by the determinations that inspire human thinking. This, in turn, makes it very important for individuals to conquer their vast mind sphere.
This can be achieved by the intellect alone that can control the senses that draw the chariot as horses; the winning charioteer is the one who dominates his horses and is unaffected by either joy or sorrow from smelling, hearing, seeing, touching, and tasting.
This is easier said than done.
For, the mind alone is the refuge of both vice and virtue. The ancients believed that by submerging itself in its own exalted state, the mind can rid itself of all its virtues and vices that are accumulations of wrong teachings (Roy, 2022).
How does one do that?
John Lennon provides us the magic formula to resolving the dilemma:
Imagine
Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us,
Above us, only sky
Imagine all the people
Livin’ for today
I…
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too
Imagine all the people
Livin’ life in peace
You …
You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll will join us
And the world will live as one
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world
You …
You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one (Lennon, 1990).
Lennon, however, claims that this one world of his imagination is outside the realm of religion, in the Kingdom of Man, not his gods.
But what does god, the one and only, say to that?
The answer to this rather complex question is not for god to answer. Pope Francis sends us a clear message on that in his Encyclical Letter of 4 October 2020 on Fratelli Tutti: It is for Man to create that one world in the way he sees god.
“Here we have a splendid secret that shows us how to dream and to turn our life into a wonderful adventure. No one can face life in isolation … We need a community that supports and helps us, in which we can help one another to keep looking ahead. How important it is to dream together… By ourselves, we risk seeing mirages, things that are not there. Dreams, on the other hand, are built together” (FT 8)
Like that beautiful dream of quintessential best friends forever, Dodola and Zam, so beautifully portrayed in Craig Thompson’s soul-kissing graphic novel Habibi. Thompson sketches an epic journey of two child slaves brought together by happenstance in the middle of nowhere. Theirs is a blooming of love born in the primordial desert, rooted in unshakeable faith. Zam and Dodola’s trust in each other leaps over deep cultural chasms between race and colour, between disbelief, make-belief, and belief, between wilderness and civilisation. Theirs is a lifelong bondage that bridges the past and the future here and now. (Thompson, 2011)
And they do that by discovering the divine not high up in the heavens above, but deep within their hearts.
And it is only in realising that god in our hearts, do we realise the beauty of our being.
We are … Beautiful!
We are the breath we take
The heat that rises from that breath
The light that shines in that heat
The water that reflects that light
The creature that emerges from that water
The odour that emanates from that creature
The touch that defines that odour
We are beautiful!
That’s all that we are! (Roy, 2022).
A beautiful and bountiful family. Truly our world is a family (vasudhaiva kuṭumbakam) and we live for one another with love, forgiveness, care and compassion.
Chittick, W. C. (2004). Me and Rumi: The Autobiography of Shams-i Tabrizi. Louisville, Ky: Fons Vitae.
Francis, Pope. (2020). Fratelli Tutti: On Fraternity and Social Friendship. Huntington: Our Sunday Visitor. (Abridged as FT)
Grimes, Linda Sue. (2021). ‘Shakespeare Sonnet 36: “Let Me Confess That We Two Must Be Twain”’. Owlcation. Retrieved 10 January 2022 (Link).
Lalla, I. (2013).: The Poems of Lal Ded. Trans. Hoskote, R. New Delhi: Penguin Books
Lennon, John W. (1990). Imagine. New York: Birch Lane Press/Ariel Books.
Roy, Shubhrangshu. (2022). Shadows of The Fragmented Moon: A Time Travel into The Depths of Mind: A Collection of 108 Wisdom Poems. February 2022.
Roy, Shubhrangshu. (2023). Hey!Ze, India in the Age of Hindutva: A Drama. Forthcoming 2022-23.
Sagan, C. (2013). Cosmos. New York: Random House Inc.
Shakespeare, W. (2014). Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Link
Tagore, R. (2003). Rabindranath Tagore Omnibus: I. New Delhi: Rupa.
Thompson, Craig. (2011). Habibi. New York : Pantheon Books
Troyat, H. (2001). Tolstoy. trans Nancy Amphoux Norwalk, CT: Easton.
Vivekananda, S. (1907). Addresses at the Parliament of Religions in 1893. Calcutta: Ramakrishna Mission.
Juejo, A. (2002). Mera ishq bhi tu: Hazrat Khvajah Ghulam Farid ki hayat va shairi ka jaizah. Multan: Bazm-e-Saqafat.
Shubhrangshu Roy is an author and poet. His debut fantasy novel Zara’s Witness, drawing on Indic wisdom, was released in 2019. His collection of poems, also relying on ancient Indic thought, Shadows of The Fragmented Moon was released in February 2022, while Hey!Ze, a contemporary fictional dialogue between an ageing Hindu journalist and a young Muslim poet, scripted in two volumes, is being vetted for publication. Shubhrangshu spent three decades as a journalist during which time he also launched and edited a national daily newspaper.
Email: [email protected] ORCID: 0000-0003-0170-7641