Author Prakash Kona

Entries 20 Total Bio

Prakash Kona (born 1967) is an Indian novelist, essayist, poet and theorist who lives in Hyderabad, India. He writes in English, and is the author of the following books to date: Nunc Stans [Creative Non-fiction: 2009, CROSSING CHAOS enigmatic ink, Ontario, Canada] Pearls of an Unstrung Necklace [Fiction: 2005, Fugue State Press, New York] Streets that Smell of Dying Roses [Fiction: 2003, Fugue State Press, New York] Other works, including essays and fictional vignettes, are published widely on the Internet. His fiction is highly unusual, an experimental combination of free-floating emotion and political theory that can depict, for example, a city or a love relationship in an ambiguous, flowing, non-concrete and yet highly personal and heartfelt manner. He is currently working as an Associate Professor at the Department of English Literature, School of English Literary Studies, The English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), Hyderabad. 

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When in Rome You’re Nobody

Sep 13, ’10 8:00 AM

When Rome was attacked by Visigoths, Saint Augustine responded by writing “City of God” where he contrasted the earthly city with the heavenly city. In some sense, Rome was the City of Man, decadent and craving for earthly pleasures as opposed to the City of God that comes from seeking divine joy.

I did not like the movie “Time of the gypsies” because it showed the gypsies in such a poor light. Emir Kusturica is a good director. He understands technique. But, he has no vision. The content does not transcend the form of the movie. It stays within limits as you would expect from a student who performs well in the exams but is not a creative genius who can dissent with the teacher and defy the exam. One important scene in the movie is set in Rome when the protagonist Perhan who from an innocent and kind human being turns corrupt and mean, meets his lost sister Danira that he dearly loves. The meeting however ends with Perhan’s death that follows the death of his innocence.

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The Illusions of Democracy in a Third World Country

Sep 6, ’10 8:00 AM

In a democracy you only have to remove the fig-leaf called the “vote” and you see the naked interests of power shamelessly parading before your eyes. It is this fig-leaf of democracy that separates India from Pakistan. In Pakistan the thieves decide the government and in fact they are the government. In India we elect them. Oh, for fig leaves!

Democracy makes sense only when the poor, the deprived and the homeless have an opportunity to come out of their poverty, deprivation and homelessness. That’s not what democracy in India is all about. It’s about crushing individual aspirations, abandoning common people to criminally inclined employers who treat employees like their possessions, robbing the young of emotional joys through a vicious system of body control, living in a system that brings out the beast in a man – that turns men into cold-blooded rapists and murderers, destroying the villages in a way that leaves the peasant weak and helpless to encounter the onslaught of globalization, putting decent people in jails because they know how to protest and they do it, giving people on the streets no chance to defend themselves except through this expensive piece of fiction called the ‘vote’ – this does not constitute a ‘real’ democracy in any sense of the term.

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Interview with Alan Morrison (part 2)

Aug 24, ’10 8:00 AM

Prakash: The media has made it terribly unfashionable to use words like “socialist” or “communist” or “leftist.” In fact any seriously pro-poor position makes it difficult for writers and researchers to find a platform to their work. How do you describe yourself and what kind of a platform have you been able to create for yourself to talk about your work and find an audience for it?

The media is half the problem as in any capitalist society; most of our national newspapers are currently like a kind of Falangist phalanx – the worst are of course under Murdoch’s plutocracy, the nastiest being the Sun, News of the World and the deeply insidious Mail. The Telegraph is for the intelligent Tory (if that’s not a contradiction in terms), but still shamelessly right-wing, as is the Times, which is a truly arrogant and unpleasant paper. The Left only has the Morning Star, which I read. The Guardian has long degenerated into a trendified muesli-munching realpolitik for the chattering classes, more pink than red, lately yellow, but then back to pink after the Lib Dems betrayed the British electorate to the devastation of a Tory administration. Yes, you never hear the word ‘socialist’ anymore; now it’s euphemised as ‘progressive’ or ‘centre-left’ or ‘left-of-centre’ – anything to appease the middle-classes and erase images of Union banners and class struggle. A fellow left-wing friend of mine once coined it perfectly: he said being a socialist these days in the UK is like being a Jedi, a Ben Kenobi hiding out in a hermitic wilderness replete with figurative cowl. But the thing to remember about the Jedi is they all have lightsabers tucked away.

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Interview with Alan Morrison (part 1)

Aug 23, ’10 8:00 AM

Alan Morrison (b. 18 July 1974) is an English poet for whom poetry is about changing the world rather than describing it. In complex and radical ways though not without conflicts, Morrison brings together his life and art to argue for “every individual’s right to a home and to food in their belly.” His most recent book “Keir Hardie Street” is published by Smokestack press.

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Media, Intellectuals and Masses

Aug 19, ’10 8:00 AM

Nothing is more dangerously addictive than the media which like the pool of Narcissus can absorb you body and soul. You fall in love with the face that is your face. You are obsessed with the voice that is your own voice. You believe in your own reality. Everything else is secondary to this one and only reality that is yourself. In Sylvia Plath’s poem “Mirror” the persona says:

“I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful –”

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Finkelstein and the Pope

Aug 3, ’10 10:00 AM

The United States is an amazing country. On the surface it looks like it has the tremendous potential to solve the third world’s problems in a day or a week at most. On the other hand the third world has no greater and more dangerous enemy than the United States. You just have to watch an American news channel to see unadulterated lies about others and how filled with contempt is this nation for the rest of the planet. Except for a small minority of dissenters the rest of the nation is pied piped by the media into utter stupidity and brainlessness that we don’t see anywhere else.

American intellectuals by and large are the biggest cowards on earth if not the most self-righteous. You can say anything about anybody but not a word about American foreign policy or Israel because whatever you say might cost you your position given the clout that the pro-Israel lobby has in the United States. The American intellectual is busy inventing excuses or apologies that justify the worst forms of atrocities and murders that his country is doing to others on this planet. Such is the nature of brainwash in this country that it would’ve embarrassed George Orwell and left him speechless.

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Rethinking the World

Jul 27, ’10 9:00 AM

To think the world is to keep the world the way it is. To rethink the world is to change it.

To change the world is to challenge the way majorities are used to thinking about the world.

A thought is a creative demon and like a virus it multiplies itself. The Buddha too acknowledged the power of thoughts. To rethink is to infect the world with the virus of a social revolution that will lead to “a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give youth a future and old age a security” (Chaplin in The Great Dictator)

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Iron Man and the “bigger-dick” US foreign policy in the Third World

Jul 19, ’10 8:00 AM

I don’t think I would have the strength to go through an Iron Man movie but for my nieces and nephew who were eager to watch it. In this barely analytical review, I’m paraphrasing the first chapter of Eric Cheyftiz’s The Poetics of Imperialism titled “Tarzan of the Apes: US Foreign Policy in the Twentieth Century” spiced with notes from George Carlin.

I just completed The Devil finds Work – an uncannily insightful book – by the black writer James Baldwin on racism in American movies. Iron Man is an arrogant, patronizing, racist prick who stands for everything that makes the United States such a crazy drunk ape of a regime. He just belongs to the long line of James Bonds and Supermans and Rambos and other dickheads who are out there to save white Americans and their families from the wretched others. There’s a point Baldwin makes over and again: what is missing or rather repressed in white American consciousness is blackness. This blackness takes myriad forms from the “blacks” themselves to communists, Arabs and gays. The stupidest American movie gives you an idea of what this hidden face of blackness is all about.

Iron Man and Sociological Imagination

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Between plagiarism and writing a bad book

Jul 9, ’10 8:00 AM

The choice is a tough one and I prefer the former. A bad book is a sign that one lacks imagination. Plagiarism is proof that you’ve some imagination. I prefer being accused of some imagination to none. An honest person would rather write a bad book. Honesty is a sign of lack of imagination. It’s not a coincidence that most criminals are imaginative people who stay in the public eye while the honest ones are condemned to die unknown. The worst thing about the honest is that they’re unbearably boring. They neither gossip nor slander – that bread and wine of the imagination!

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On Being a Stateless Actor

Jun 21, ’10 8:00 AM

I’ve fallen in love with the phrase “non-state actor.” If nothing else you can credit the Pakistani government for coming up with fig-leaf expressions like this one to hide naked lies which is the essence of the state itself.

For years and years I’ve not voted. Usually the reason is that my name is never on the voter’s list and I’m too lazy to get it enrolled merely to have the opportunity to choose between a worm that sucks blood and a blood-sucking worm. The meaning is the same and the difference grammatical in terms of what comes first, the “worm” or the “blood.”

People who overstate the importance of voting as central to democracy are liars. Democracy is not just about voting. Democracy is about having real choices in your private and public life. In a country like India only money can buy you those choices. They’re not rights that come with birth. Citizenship does not ensure those rights and neither does voting make a difference at a fundamental level. The poor simply have no choice. Those who think that to vote is the main issue – they’re people who’re not looking for real change.

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