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The Tip of a Double-Edged Resolution PAGE 2

The Former Chancellor of Germany PAGE 4

Absurdle - Our Mutual Obsession with Wordle PAGE 6

Anti Art PAGE 8

8th Edition February 2022

Importance of Gender Equality PAGE 10

01/01/20__

by Kalash Jain New Year's Eve brings with it the uncurtailed burden of concocting a resolution to hopefully evolve us into a version of ourselves we feel more comfortable with. In a broader sense, the optimists ensure a grand entry with broken promises glued together with balloons and rainbow coloured confetti. The pessimists decided long ago that minimal effort was the only path to contentment, even if hidden under the veil of mediocrity. As for the realists, whom I personally like to associate with skeptics, question the mere foundation of a resolution.

For it is imperative to notice the deep contrast between the sides of this double-edged sword and choose a side more suited to the subjectivity of one’s own self.

On the sharper side, we have an opportunity to better the parts of ourselves we’re not so happy with. A new year brings with it the illusion of a fresh start. A clean slate. A new beginning. A chance to build the momentum that was lacking to reach the finish line. And so what if it is an illusion. Who are we to deem it so, for one could argue that in its true essence, everything could very well be an illusion, but that’s for another time. For now, we go along with the pragmatism behind the grandness of one revolution around a star. And it works. Maybe because when the burden of our past lifts off of our shoulders, even if not truly, we feel lighter, we create space for a future we would want to be a part of. And that space, if only enough for a deep breath, can make one change, find a deeper resolve, tap into the parts of themselves they didn’t know existed. Thus, the joy of a new year is felt parallel to our own potential, and hence, the unreluctant extravagant grandeur which if not for anything, ensures to bring a smile to our faces, for a new day has dawned, one where we could reach for the stars without anyone pulling us down, including ourselves.

But the other side, the one which doesn’t shy away from its bluntness, is one that people don’t really talk about. The side which ridicules our resolution, and laughs at the importance we give to it. It sheds light on the glaringly obvious and yet somehow subtle correlation between our resolution and our good ol’ friend, procrastination. For we have to understand that although a new year comes with its sense of a clean slate, that’s just what it is, an imagined sense, not the reality, for we cannot conveniently believe that the consequences of our older self don't hang over us like a chandelier strung together by a thin thread. It demands us to give some weight to the notion that we don’t really need a bloated unified event just to change ourselves for the better. It nudges us to bring change consistently, even if on a smaller scale. We need to be reminded of what happens when our resolutions don’t follow through. The weight of that failure along with the stagnancy of our self-betterment can send us in the opposite direction, further away from where we wanted to be. It can make us dependent on externalities just to make ourselves better, to be able to look in the mirror with a wider smile, even if not real. This side panders to the part of you that loves yourself, the side of you that knows that your worth is a reflection of how you think of yourself, and isn’t bothered by the outside world. It advocates change as a personal victory at your own pace, untethered by the rat race of a “more successful” growth of the people around us.

Both sides of this sword are, rather passionately, a cutting contrast of how you may look at it. In the end, as always, the choice to pick a side falls on the reader, and this part of the piece is simply a suggestion to reflect whether the narrative presented, either of the literal sides, or of the contrast itself, could be extrapolated into other parts of your existence, and where do you stand in the greater scheme of things, which could very well be as simple as yourself.

The

Former

Chancellor of Germany

by Ishaan Verma

The stigma against women leaders is so strong, that even today, women are not encouraged to participate in government. Although the stated reasons are numerous, the truth lays barewomen are underrepresented. And it’s not a coincidence. According to a UN Women report, as of 1 September 2021, there are 26 women serving as Heads of State and/or Government in 24 countries. At the current rate, gender equality in the highest positions of power will not be reached for another 130 years. Just 10 countries have a woman Head of State, and 13 countries have a woman Head of Government. It’s evidently rare to have a woman head the state or government, even rarer for her to be reelected and reelected again.

As she steps down after 16 years in office, this article talks about the little known facts of the life of a person who has defied these figures, heading perhaps the most powerful state in all of the European Union. Angela Merkel rose from the grips of the Soviet rule of East Germany, getting involved in the growing democracy movement and proving herself to be the ‘Mutti’ of Germany.

Merkel was born Angela Dorothea Kasner in 1954, in Hamburg, West Germany. She is of German and Polish descent. Her grandfather was a German policeman who had taken part in Poland's struggle for independence in the early 20th century.

She has a doctorate in quantum chemistry (1986) and worked as a research scientist until 1989. She worked as a bartender at disco parties in college.

Although she did not participate in the crowd celebrations the night the Berlin wall came down Merkel became involved in the growing democracy movement, joining the new party Demokratischer Aufbruch (Democratic Beginning).

Angela Merkel served as the chancellor of Germany from 2005-to 2021. She was the first female chancellor of Germany.

During her tenure as Chancellor, Merkel was frequently referred to as the de facto leader of the European Union (EU).

Angela Merkel was ranked the most powerful woman 14 times from 2006 to 2020, with the exception of 2010, when Michele Obama was named so.

In 1977, at the age of 23, Angela married physics student Ulrich Merkel and took his surname. The marriage ended in divorce in 1982. Her second husband Joachim Sauer, a professor at Berlin University, dislikes publicity so much he didn’t even show up to Merkel’s 2005 inauguration as Chancellor.

In foreign policy, Merkel has emphasised international cooperation, both in the context of the EU and NATO, and strengthening transatlantic economic relations. She played a crucial role in managing the global financial crisis of 2007– 2008 and the European debt crisis.

She has taken many notable decisions for her country. In 2009, she introduced a constitutional debt brake (during the debt crisis) guaranteeing balanced budgets, her 2011 resolution to phase out nuclear energy after Japan’s Fukushima disaster, and her 2015 decision to override EU rules on asylum seekers and open Germany’s borders to more than one million refugees from Syria and elsewhere are some of the important ones that kept her in the news.

She is truly a household name! She is reportedly a very good cook, makes a mean plum cake, and has been spotted shopping for groceries at regular supermarkets where she pays in cash.

Her followers call her ‘Mutti’, which means ‘Mommy’

Despite having been in power for so long, Merkel is regularly ranked Germany’s most popular politician. In August 2021, Merkel’s approval was high among the elderly(57%) and Gen Xers (53%) alike.

Merkel is a huge soccer fan and she frequently visits the German soccer team’s locker rooms to congratulate them after a win.

ABSURDLE

By Arushi Aggarwal

The 3rd year of pandemic comes with its own obsession - 2020 had dalgona coffee and banana bread, 2021 had Reels, a feature we all knew was a direct rip-off of TikTok but latched onto and 2022 has Wordle. Wordle! One word a day, five letters, six tries. A friend recently said, “Wordle is spreading faster than Omicron” - a statement which, while slightly tone-deaf if one peeks at the mounting death count, isn’t too far off from the truth. If you’re on Twitter, WhatsApp, Facebook (we must ask why?) or really any kind of social media, you’ve almost certainly seen these white, yellow and green tiles on your feed, posted without context and to be fair, quoting a popular audio, “If you get it, you get it. If you don’t, you don’t”.

The universality and popularity of Wordle stems from the overwhelming need for communal experiences. It comes into our lives when the omicron variant has us all home-bound again, stuck behind the blue screen, bridging the gap to the staggered form our social interactions have taken for two years now. Perhaps it comes down to how easy it is to join in or how it takes minimal social commitment to be a part of the community. You come, you play, you talk about it, you move on - until the clock strikes midnight again, and it's as if the magic is renewed. While the unprecedented times of COVID-19 continue with no certain end in the future, there seems to be a collective sense of burnout. Technologies, which used to seem appealing after a long day of being social, have now passed the point of staleness and entered the realm of resentment: Zoom fatigue, yet another group of strangers on your timeline fighting about absolutely nothing, the feeling of having millions of options and nothing to watch. There just isn’t all that much to say anymore - in how many different ways can you describe how you did your job or how you flaked on lectures for the umpteenth time or, better yet, how you spent yet another day doing nothing. Wordle has found a way to fill multiple voids; giving you an avenue to switch off your brain for a few minutes, but providing a solid foundation for conversation with others. Is posting a small block of colored emojis actually being social? Maybe not, but we’ll take it.

There is nothing inherently political for Wordle. Nobody is sticking it to anybody else by either playing it or not playing it. And best of all, it’s not here to stay. The game will linger online for years, but the phenomenon of sharing one score is destined to flame out quickly and many will eventually stick to close groups of friends reveling in the tries it took to crack the word for the day. No matter who you are or what is in store for the future of Wordle, you can find comfort in the fact that every player can agree that ‘KNOLL’ was downright outrageous. You leave the day feeling a tiny sense of achievement with no consequential significance but achievement when you get the word within six tries and if you don’t succeed in guessing today? Tomorrow brings with it six new tries.

by Sparsh Jandial

Anti Art

We all need to be exposed to, enjoy, create and be inspired by art and culture for fulfilling lives, and I think we can agree that any decent society should provide us with opportunities to do so. With Mitski talking about how this system dehumanizes her every time art demands her to be vulnerable, I believe it's only natural to wonder about the relationship between radical art and capitalism. Spoiler Alert: It's a toxic one.

Today, revolutionary art is an oxymoron. It is a lengthy, terrible joke and our hopelessness serves as the punchline. It's a victim of a morbid industry dominated by celebrity publicity and Wall Street billionaires. Our works are commodities, the sale of which is generally unregulated, and whose worth is resilient even in the face of economic plunges. In layman terms, this system is just straight-up killing the vibes.

It wasn't always this hopeless. Avant-garde art was once seen as a revolutionary activity that was socially effective and publicly disruptive.

Nevertheless, it still manages to slip under the noses of our cathedral machinery and fuck around with the fading radical consciousness thanks to its self preserving nature. (It would be impossible to completely eradicate antiauthoritarian beliefs when authority is precisely the thing giving birth to them.)

Let’s do a quick rewind. It's 1917 and the war is raging across continental Europe as ruling elites send the poor to eat machine-gun bullets for their interests. In an alleyway somewhere in Zurich, the capital of neutral Switzerland there are two visionaries. Vanguard Lenin and the artistic avantgarde in the form of the Dadaist Cabaret Voltaire. While Lenin was writing about imperialism and its perils, the Dadaists were making anti-war paintings. Being revolutionary in nature, both of these works strive to disrupt the status quo but what connects them is the failure to reach their full potential and the frustration that comes along with it.

It’s impossible not to acknowledge failure and frustration when discussing anti-authoritarian culture under capitalism. The history of avant-garde art is full of examples of artists who challenged institutional art.

Diego Rivera, a Mexican communist viewed himself as a radical and hung out with Leninists in Paris. He painted murals that were anti-imperialist and pro-labour. It responded to human misery and exploitation. He even signed a manifesto that said that the aim of art is to raise the ideological, cultural, and domestic levels of the working class's backward strata who are oppressed by the bourgeoisie. These days you need to have a few million dollars lying around to own this radically anti-capitalist art.

Banksy is a street artist, and a genius rebel because his art is out there to be viewed for free apart from the isolated gallery spaces and the private collections of the rich. Right? No. He paints on a wall, they fucking cut out the wall and sell it. Banksy tries his hardest to subvert and makes six-figure sums precisely by doing so. His work is critical of the privatised art world, but it is largely sponsored and loved by an elite group of people.

Celebrity street artist Jean-Michel Basquiat tagged New York streets with anticapitalist messages. Fast forward a few years, and he is found overdosed in his Manhattan art studio which marks both suicide and resignation from an untenable dual life. Who'd have guessed that being celebrated by the same system that turned his work into mere commodities in the marketplace of flashy ideas would be detrimental to his mental health?

An artwork is accorded 'iconic' status only when it is deprived of any possible function or context. It is devoured, regurgitated and we are supposed to cherry pick on the leftovers floating in the vomit.

Mark Fisher talked about how capitalism subsumes and consumes all of the previous histories. It assigns all cultural objects, whether they are religious iconography, pornography, or Bo Burnham's new special, a monetary value. Walk around the British Museum, where you see objects torn from their lifeworlds and you have a powerful image of this process at work. In the conversion of practices and rituals into merely aesthetic objects, the beliefs of previous cultures are transformed into artefacts.

Yet this turn from belief to aesthetics, from involvement to spectatorship, is regarded as one of capitalism's strengths. The status quo portrays this as a shield that protects us from the dangers of belief. We're advised that reducing our expectations is a minor price to pay in exchange for being spared the dread of revolutionary ideas. They are terrified, and capitalism suppresses or regurgitates all of their concerns.

It's like when Kurt Cobain found himself stuck in a world best described by Frederick Jameson. One when creative innovation is no longer conceivable, all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to communicate through the masks and voices of the styles in the imaginary museum.

The understanding of this relationship between art and capitalism only ends with several morbid questions. Would commercial success mean an artistic failure in this environment? How long can a culture last if it can't even reconfigure or re-establish itself with the passage of time? Is it really possible to call an idea radical when it is constantly rendered digestible for new minds? If their ideas aren't marketable, where do the working-class artists go? Do we live in a fucking contradiction?

A write in from one of our readers:

by Aaditya Singh

Nelson Mandela said-“Freedom cannot be achieved until women have been emancipated of all forms of oppression.”

Women have, since time immemorial, been a personification of hard work and tolerance. She is the most honourable. It is a well-known fact that when presented with equal opportunities, women hold immense potential to change the world.

Who can forget how Margaret Thatcher, the former British PM, earned the title of “Iron Lady”? Who can forget how Malala Yousafzai, as a 14year-old girl, sustained bullets shot in her head only to emerge out fearlessly and win the Nobel Peace Prize? Women today are holding many responsible positions in the world. Such a world must treat women respectfully and grant them the rights they clearly deserve.

It is quite ironic that in our nation, India, where Goddess Lakshmi is worshipped as the God of wealth and Goddess Saraswati as the God of education, would witness the girl child not being provided with equal opportunities, simply due to age-old beliefs? We still live in a patriarchal society. Some North Indian states have the most skewed sex ratio.

Women are viewed as an economic liability. Sexual harassment in the workplace has become common now.

We should not forget that had the ground-breaking discoveries in radioactivity not been made by Marie Curie, we would probably have not been able to tap into the power of nuclear energy! Marie Curie, a woman, won two Nobel Prizes for her intelligent work.

Women are smart and capable. In the words of Vivekananda“Educate your women first and then leave them to themselves; they will tell you what reforms are needed”. Women empowerment is the need of the hour. This can be achieved by the Parliament passing the

Women Reservation Bill for reserving 33% seats in legislature. The law enforcing agencies have to be made accountable to citizens. People need to be sensitized and made aware for proper treatment of women.

2001 was observed as the Year of Women’s Empowerment to make people aware of women’s rightful place in the society. Women need to try to emancipate themselves. Mothers should treat their sons and daughters alike. Boys have to be taught to respect girls and uphold the dignity of women, from childhood itself. Man should revere women for her contribution towards the precociousness of man. This would make him aware of his responsibilities towards women emancipation. A society that respects women is deemed to be a progressive one. As long as half of humanity is treated lesser than the other half, it cannot prosper.

Women empowerment is the need of the hour.

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