“In a time of destruction,
Create something: a poem, a parade
A community, a school, a vow, a moral principal;
One peaceful moment.”
– Maxine Hong Kingston.

May ended in a trail of destruction in several parts of the world. Here, in this part of the world, it came in form of a natural calamity, a severe cyclone that lashed through huts and tenements, caused landslides, claimed lives. One wonders at the class elitism that shapes our points of view, reflected in our social media statuses, and none of us are immune to this. While most of us in the concrete jungle waited for the storm to lash out and bring cooling rain to a scorched and parched city, people in the mangroves fled for their lives, evacuated in congregations, creating interim communities.

Elsewhere, war rages, forces of patriarchy choose women and children as targets almost everywhere in a range of many, more and most horrifying acts and while celebrities walk red carpets with watermelon pouches in support and solidarity, nothing changes where it matters most. Fascism rages through humanity threatening democracies and it is during such time that one turns to literature and films, both near and far, for it is in this medium that voices emerge, subverting propaganda, autocracy and dominance in micro and macro spaces, because what affects one, always affects many. None of us are truly immune. However, as history has shown time and again, when forces of autocracy loom too large, we are saved by one another. There’s hope yet.

In this spirit, this month we try to cover a wider range of stories and voices from different parts, focusing especially on Kannada literature this time in form of poems and informed book reviews. We also cover Malayalam, Gujarati, Hindi, Bengali, Italian and Albanian translations, all of which talk of the essential human condition, life as we live it in this deeply clefted world.