Hajrah Mumtaz

WHO would disagree that armed conflict is an awful consequence of disagreement between men, their hubris, or“vaulting ambition”. Awful, but sometimes necessary. Consider the war of independence suffered by our subcontinent — a sneaky takeover through the instrument of the East India Company that employed aggression to colonise, but eventually required much violence to counter. And therefore, if a situation comes to where armed conflict becomes inevitable, the goal is obviously to win.

THINK of a product(ion) — a book or poem, a movie or song, a painting or sculpture — as a ‘text’: something tangible that can be unpicked, researched and, as such, the strands of meaning interpreted. To whom does a text of importance truly belong? Is the use of it and its legacy the prerogative of its creator, the person(s) who brought to life something out of nothing? Or does it belong to its audience and the inheritors?

THE internet, to keep one’s tongue firmly in the cheek, has its uses. In the wake of climate-change disasters of increasing frequency, from forest fires in France, to floods in the Nevada desert, to the calamitous conditions being experienced here with, God help us, no end in sight, a certain newspaper archival snippet has been doing the rounds.