Editorial

Remember, remember, the month of November – for the second issue of L’Inkre Magazine is out!

We are truly heartened by your warm, enthusiastic response to our inaugural issue and would like to thank you for your continued support. Thank you for reading, and thank you for spreading the word!

We are happy to welcome this month several new contributors – we’re sure that their disparate styles and contents will add to your reading pleasure. This month our house blend includes, among others, a treatise on art and the Indian state , a call for change, the nutty undertones of modern mutterings, as well as a selection of poetry served to the age-old refrain of love and unlove.

As usual, we would like to stress that L’Inkre is non-profit, monetarily or academically, non-partisan, non-prejudiced. We do it to write – and would like to invite you to join us on this journey! This month all our entries happen to be in English, but we welcome submissions in any languages. We’d love for you to join us as a writer, but as a reader, you’re important to us too – we need your feedback! Be it on the writing, or on the content, or on the website, any suggestions and comments are welcome, here on the blog or at inkre.magazine@gmail.com.

And for now, bonne lecture!



I give you a present

by coffeeaddict

I give you a present.

Touch it,

it crackles like an old-school ceiling fan that lifts whiffs of perfume and whispers of hair from graceful shoulders.

Smell it,

sweet as summer rain when fingertips first touched and intense like the ambrosia of discarded lace lingerie.

Hear it,

the sky storms in the not-box as dramatically as the first flutter of your lashes at first light.

Taste it,

(no you can’t),

but take heart, you can taste its addiction to the riotous contradiction of speeding through cross junctions and curling up in a safehouse.

See it,

but only with it.

Technology and Superstition

Or, a case of inextricably tangled metaphors

by &c

It started from the day your grandfather demonstrated that all it took to get rid of the white noise disturbing your favourite cartoon were a couple of firm knocks of his cane on the side of the television set – and perhaps a third on the top for good measure. A few judicious taps of the wand and voilà, problem solved! Just like in Harry Potter! People say the supernatural is just phenomena the sciences cannot explain yet – or could it be that we’re just n00bs?

In any case, technology has become like a religion to us, at whose altar we perform daily devotions, and there even is a plurality of cults – from the ascetic Linux adherents to the evangelical Mac users. Now that the “computer is personal again”, according to the HP prophets, we’ve gotten into the habit of carrying these little high-tech helpers around. And like any believer worth his salt, we have our superstitions too.

These personal gods or genies are highly temperamental, and we pander to their whims, afraid of offending them. We apologise for any inadvertent harm that comes to their, er, chassis, and plead for forgiveness. We bargain with them, to hold off their blue-screened wrath until our essays are saved. We bribe them with promises of lavish attention in the form of a scan session followed by defragmentation therapy, if they would deign to start their royal selves up.

Sometimes things go wrong anyway, and we seek guidance from other lost souls who have found the way. They proffer enlightenment in the form of shamanic rites: “remove the battery, then unplug the AC power source. Press and hold the power button for as long as the breath of a calf born on the last new moon, and don’t forget the single phoenix tear – your Bluetooth should work again the next time you start it up”. Had the instructions involved the drawing of a pentagram and human sacrifice we would remain unfazed.

Yet sometimes we are driven to despair, and begin to question God. We try to hide our crisis of faith, and surreptitiously look up other deities on public terminals, hoping to circumvent a rebellion, but the little devils are omniscient and our blasphemy does not go unpunished. Only as we are struck down by pent-up electrical rage do we repent, but by then it is too late, too late – the day we were taken in by the snake’s slippery promises of knowledge at the tip of our fingers is the day we condemn ourselves to the eternal vagaries of the coy, capricious entities occupying our magic boxes.