Exi(s)ting Without Exit in Contemporary India: “Hum Hain Ki Hum Nahin?”
Exi(s)ting Without Exit in Contemporary India: “Hum Hain Ki Hum Nahin?” Posted on 25th April, 2026 (GMT 02:48 hrs) DEBAPRASAD BANDYOPADHYAY ⤡ AKHAR BANDYOPADHYAY ⤡ In the shadowed corridors of April 2026, a lone whistleblower’s fevered consciousness spirals endlessly around the single, shattering question — “Hum hain ki hum nahin?” (to be or not to be?) — existence or erasure. Trapped inside a shrinking Mumbai flat that has become both sanctuary and prison, he navigates the razor’s edge between the flickering glow of his laptop screen and the perpetual terror of the doorbell, suspended in the velvet noose of an undeclared emergency where words are crossed out before they can breathe, hate speech cruises freely along golden highways of power, while dissent drowns on isolated atolls of silence. Obsessively rewinding the traffic-island monologue from Haider, he mouths existential defiance as Rabindrasangeet clashes with raw paranoia, Tagore’s ancient frog — me...