Jadi Rana sent the Zoroastrians a full glass of milk, to indicate that his kingdom was filled to the brim. In response, the Zoroastrians poured sugar into the milk and gave it back, without spilling a single drop.
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I could relate to Devi a lot. Maybe it is because Devi wears striped shirts and mom jeans — things I wear every day, like a cartoon character -- maybe it’s her way of dealing with trauma, maybe it’s that the only emotion she expresses in public is anger and that she is constantly fixated on doing things that would look good on her university applications, or maybe it’s simply her relationship with her mother.
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Aesthetics like Kaling’s seem unaware that you can be attached to your culture, informed by it, but also break it down, question it, tear it apart to create holes in it so more voices can come through. It is uncomfortable work, but it is possible –— I know many Indians and South-Asians across the world that do it every day.
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Ilker Hepkaner and Sezgin Inceel are co-hosts of Yine Yeni Yeniden 90’lar, a podcast which analyzes 90s Turkish pop music from feminist and queer lenses. They wrote about the first pop songs they remember, and how it relates to issues of nostalgia and belonging.
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Hollywood celebrates representation politics and white saviourism as it did in Green Book, The Help or Driving Miss Daisy. It tries to be something new when in fact, it stays very loyal to Hollywood’s legacy.
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We can’t talk about climate change without talking about occupied lands, disability, displaced populations and gender equality. It’s a crisis yes, but it’s not transcendent. It’s important, yes; but not more important than any ongoing human rights struggle.
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When I watched the movies I watched and listened to the music I listened to, I felt like Rapunzel, looking through a window at people living their lives and desperately trying to emulate it up in my own little tower. I didn’t like looking at the white world through a window and not being able to experience that life in my peripheral country, but I couldn’t help it.
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Istanbul’s particular legacy of continual destruction – that of nature, history and the city itself – is certainly a source of great chagrin and resignation for its denizens. But not just that: a great deal of fight, discourse, resistance, civil solidarity and determination swirls around these issues, renewing one’s faith in humanity in new ways every day.
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As if suffering nearly nine years of what the United Nations has deemed the “crime of extermination” at the hands of a totalitarian dictatorship wasn’t enough, Syrians still have to deal with Westerners determined to whitewash Bashar al-Assad and his regime’s barbaric use of chemical weapons.
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There was no colloquial equivalent for the word “lesbian” in my mother tongue, and that may have contributed to my feelings of shame and solitude for a large part of my childhood.
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Mangal Media is approaching it's fourth year at the start of a brand new decade! As winter starts to thaw, we decided that the time has come to bring together all our friends in Istanbul who have been a part of this journey. Our hope is to carry the coziness of our online community into real life and create an occasion to bring together writers, artists and everybody else who are interested in our upcoming projects. We hope to see you in Arthere on March 14.
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It’s a steep learning curve to manage your first-world preferences when you go back to a beloved society which still prefers to cook over a flaming hole in the ground. So if you, like me, moved to London and became a vegetarian because you wanted to ruin your grandparents’ lives, here’s how you can still enjoy yourself.
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