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Indrapramit Das @indrapramitdas.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Many thanks to the @britfantasysoc.bsky.social for the lovely award, & to @subpress.bsky.social for kindly shipping it to me in India (& publishing the book it's for!). THE LAST DRAGONERS OF BOWBAZAR is a book I'm very proud of, with a v small readership, so I'm truly grateful for the recognition.

Photo of a framed 2024 British Fantasy Award for Best Novella, awarded to The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar by me. The text for the award is set in clear resin against a pale blue and sandy brown background, and the resin holds a dragon's skeleton framing the text.

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Indrapramit Das @indrapramitdas.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

If you liked recent UFO cult classic THE VAST OF NIGHT (2019), writer-director Andrew Patterson's THE RIVALS OF AMZIAH KING (2025) is an excellent follow-up, a rousing, off-kilter portrait of human communities as hives (& swarms, stinging), & a (honey) heist film of sorts.

Film still, the figure of a lone woman in silhouette in a frame entirely filled with darkness, with a single flame toward which she is walking, which looks like a crown of fire over her head.

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Indrapramit Das @indrapramitdas.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Radu Jude's KONTINENTAL '25 maintains his precision at jabbing the needle straight into the dystopian zeitgeist, this time with a more modest portrayal of the Sisyphean endeavor of navigating guilt, complicity, & cowardice in the polycrisis. I swear this movie feels like a metaphor for Bluesky.

Two brunette middle-aged white women in autumnal clothes talk on a bench in a Romanian city square. One says to the other: 'How can a child's life depend on affording medication?'

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Indrapramit Das @indrapramitdas.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

BLUE HERON (2026); aglow with grief & love. A document of art, film, fiction as the dream in which you see the selves, people, times, loved ones you've lost, even if none of it is quite the same, even if none of it can ease the pain of all things passing, of all that was and is broken beyond repair.

Film still; a brunette white woman with long hair in a sleeveless top standing at a window in golden evening sunlight, seen from behind. Her hands are on the window. Outside, children play in a garden, and one little girl is on the other side of the window, her hands on the glass too, against the woman's.

Film still; a middle-aged white woman holds her forehead to the head of a white teenage boy with loose blonde hair, wearing glasses. They're seen from the side in a close shot, in dim yellow light.

Film still; a white woman in a bathtub, her face blurry and seen close from the side out of focus, in vivid pink light. On the tiles of the bathroom, the reflection of a screen playing a B&W movie.

Film still; two figures, side by side but facing opposite directions, on a rock against the silver canvas of the sea, and forested hills across the water in golden evening light.

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Indrapramit Das @indrapramitdas.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

The Automaton. Charcoal and 2B pencil on paper.

Charcoal drawing in thick stylised lines and shaded shadows of the head of a bald humanoid being, implacable face, eyes unseen in dark bleeding shadows. Something is dripping in thin lines from its mouth, silvery in graphite pencil.

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Indrapramit Das @indrapramitdas.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

If you see this, post your black and white art. (All my art is black and white)

Charcoal pencil portrait on paper of an imagined dragoner from my novella THE LAST DRAGONERS OF BOWBAZAR, drawn by me, showing a young woman in a headscarf, looking straight ahead with fierce determination. Her face is tattooed with the design of a dragon, and a claw or fang hangs from one earlobe. Her long black hair flows out of her headscarf.

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Indrapramit Das @indrapramitdas.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Tippett's work is all over some of the most iconic movies ever made, of course, but everyone should watch his incredible, hellishly oneiric stop-motion masterpiece MAD GOD (2021), which took him 30 years to complete.

Still from Mad God, showing a silhouetted figure against a giant, slimy head with a huge, bloodshot eye staring wildly.

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Indrapramit Das @indrapramitdas.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

I blocked this asshole, but wanted to say that implying people helping Palestinians 'get off' on their 'groveling gratitude' & are 'purchasing' this, might be on the most evil liberal spins on 'I don't wanna see genocide survivors on my TL & don't want to help so fuck you for my guilt'.

Bsky user William B. Fuckley ( @opinionhaver.bsky.social) posting: It is trivially easy to give to a legitimate charity attempting to aid Gaza, if you're aware enough of the existence of scams to get defensive about it you know this, & you just get off on them performing groveling gratitude for you. You're purchasing a service from them, & it is a repulsive one.

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Indrapramit Das @indrapramitdas.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Report and block this wildly racist loser.

A racist American dipshit ('Deuce', bsky handle @davidshorfan.bsky.social) quote-posting my post saying 'I am' in response to me saying that liberals should be 'sated and happy' now that Palestinians are being ignored on Bluesky and dying in front of our eyes.

My full post: You have got to be kidding, Bluesky liberals have restarted the 'Palestinians are actually scams run by slaves' discourse AGAIN. You guys won! Most of this site doesn't share or donate to them anymore. They are dying in front of our eyes. Be happy and sated.

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Indrapramit Das @indrapramitdas.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

POSSESSION; even better than remembered. To be cuckolded by god/ to escape the terror of men by sleeping with god, only to find god fashioned in the image of man. Isabelle Adjani's performance is genuinely one of the greatest ever put to film, you can feel her communing with her very soul.

Still from Possession; a statue of Christ on the cross, seen from below, his eyes closed in suffering.

Still from Possession; Isabelle Adjani looking up into the camera

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Indrapramit Das @indrapramitdas.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Lord, Emma D'Arcy is Very striking as Rhynaera in HOUSE OF THE DRAGON. I love how pre-decay Melnibonéan the Targaryens feel in the show.

Emma D'Arcy as Queen Rhaenyra in House of the Dragon, in beautifully detailed armour and cape and a chain mail hood (?) with a golden crown. Subtitle text: I am the Prince That Was Prophesied.

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Indrapramit Das @indrapramitdas.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

TALE FROM THE HOOD (1995); pop art channeling the undying horrors of a slave-built imperialist settler state with the political acuity of a documentary. Good shit.

Still from Tales From the Hood, showing a blonde white man hitting a painted mural of a Black woman sitting on a chair surrounded by a crowd of dolls of Black men and women. The white man is using a US flag to strike the wall, obscuring the face of the Black woman.

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Indrapramit Das @indrapramitdas.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

RIP. The kind of dedicated practical fx artist the film industry increasingly has less use for, to its great detriment.

Still of the 'shunting' from Society (1989), showing a surreal orgy of bodies melting into each other in the dim reddish light of a grotesque party of evil rich people. Practical fx by Screaming Mad George.

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Indrapramit Das @indrapramitdas.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

I was pretty obsessed with Blake's art long before I properly read him. This was often the wallpaper on my desktop for many years in my teens.

William Blake's watercolour painting The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed With the Sun, showing (from behind) a muscular humanoid dragon with pale skin, curling horns, and a thick tail, standing with legs and wings spread apart, looming over a woman clothed in flame-like robes and with fiery blonde hair.

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Indrapramit Das @indrapramitdas.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

It is the death day of William Blake, without whom (as is obvious from multiple of its epigraphs) my debut novel THE DEVOURERS wouldn't be the creature it is. Here is the portion of 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell' that gave me the title.

Plate 16 of William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, showing a portion of text including 'Thus one portion of being, is the Prolific. the other, the Devouring', and an image of huddled figures at the top.

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Indrapramit Das @indrapramitdas.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

MADDIE'S SECRET (2026); a cis man playing a cis woman with an eating disorder feels ripe for disaster, but John Early (as both the lead & as director/writer) plays it beautifully, clearly pouring his heart into this idiosyncratic character study melding comedy, melodrama, sincerity.

Still from Maddie's Secret; a blonde woman (played by director John Early) seen from the side in a blue and white flower-print top in a public restroom stall, arms up to pull back her hair, which is tied in a ponytail. She is draped in shadows, light falling across the top of her head and onto the restroom door.

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Indrapramit Das @indrapramitdas.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

This was Kolkata, December 2019, during the anti-CAA protests. That movement was massive, nationwide, and brutally met by the regime, who then crushed it with the aid of the pandemic.

Protesters thronging the New Market area in Kolkata, December 2019.

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Indrapramit Das @indrapramitdas.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

I've no desire to watch the Sex Purge movie, but the ungloving scene in Scorsese's THE AGE OF INNOCENCE or so much of Wong Kar-wai's work shows that you can make movies without nudity or sex sensual, romantic, and horny as all hell too. A lot of modern mainstream movies just feel glossily insensate.

Still from The Age of Innocence, showing a close-up of hands--a white man's, gently, barely touching a white woman's set on the lap of a dark red dress.

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Indrapramit Das @indrapramitdas.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

POSSESSION (1981) Dir: Andrzej Żuławski DP: Bruno Nuytten

Still from Possession; a large, sparsely furnished, gloomy European apartment bedroom with dingy yellow wallpaper, blinds drawn over the large window dimming the daylight across the wooden floors, and a mattress covered in sickly green on the floor, upon which lies a vaguely humanoid shape, red and wet as a newborn, limbs perhaps like tentacles. In the foreground, a white woman in a blue dress she is taking off to reveal her bare back, her long, dark brown hair against her slender shoulders.

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Indrapramit Das @indrapramitdas.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

The 'based on Homer's The Odyssey' credit feels like a Coens joke, like the FARGO disclaimer; interesting to see the poem's polytheistic narrative meld w/ the Coens' monotheistic cosmology of an an amoral God--humans like Chigurh & the Sheriff feel like corrupt images of god(s), divine justice.

Still from O Brother, Where Art Though; a white man (character actor Daniel von Bargen) in a sheriff's uniform, wearing goggle-like black-tinted sunglasses, from the chest up, standing in a sunlit yard with trees behind him. Subtitle text: 'The law is a human institution.'

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Indrapramit Das @indrapramitdas.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

Amir needs a new phone--it's his only lifeline to the world beyond Israel's genocidal siege. He sent me a recording of Israeli gunfire near where his family is 2 nights ago. They're starving, sick, homeless, & terrified. Please help them survive by sharing & donating: chuffed.org/project/help...

Banner showing two Palestinians: Amir, a young man crying while holding up a broken phone, and his mother, a middle-aged woman lying in bed with an eyepatch sleeping. Text: 'My name is Amir Shamala, from...Gaza, Palestine. I live in a torn tent with my father. We are living in very difficult conditions & struggling to survive every day. My mother is seriously ill. She has a dangerous condition in her eye...She urgently needs surgery outside Gaza, but the borders are closed...For now, we can only afford...medical supplies to temporarily treat the bleeding & reduce her pain. My only phone...is broken. I urgently need a new phone so I can continue working & asking for help for my mother. I am doing everything I can to save my mother & survive....Please help my mother & me. Your support can make a real difference. For urgent assistance & verification: +970597440040'

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Indrapramit Das @indrapramitdas.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU? (2000) DP: Roger Deakins

Still from O Brother Where Art Thou?; three 'sirens' bathing in a river in Mississippi, surrounded by lush trees.

Still from O Brother Where Art Thou?; a policeman with a shotgun in silhouette in the golden beam of light pouring into a dim hall through open doors. Faceless in the dark, an ogre.

Still from O Brother Where Art Thou?; A lightning-lit branch blue-white like a bolt of lightning against black sky.

Still from O Brother Where Art Thou?; three men in the foreground of the frame, from behind, peering through bushes at an enclosure in a wooded area at night, eerily lit by flaming torches and a burning cross--in the enclosure are rings of white-robed dancing Klansmen.

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Indrapramit Das @indrapramitdas.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

Amir's brother is sick with a high fever, his mother needs urgent eye surgery, his phone has broken, & his family's starving, homeless, & fleeing constant bombing within Israel's genocidal siege. Please bring him some hope by sharing & donating, every little thing helps: chuffed.org/project/help...

Amir, a young Palestinian man, holding his broken phone and crying.

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Indrapramit Das @indrapramitdas.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

This reminded me that I once drew a Cyclops.

Pencil drawing of a Cyclops from the shoulders and neck up--resembling a muscular, bald man with a single eye in his forehead, and what looks like ritualistic scars across his face.

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Indrapramit Das @indrapramitdas.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

LEVITICUS (2026); 3 of this year's horror movies feature doppelgangers/incorrect iterations of people, & I keep thinking of genAI. Hate as a bodysnatcher, a betrayal of what we owe to ourselves & each other, as bodily creatures. A darkly romantic queer love story, if underdeveloped as horror.

Still from Leviticus, showing two young white men sitting next to each other on a bus at night, their faces close enough to kiss, eyes closed, mouths obscured by the arm and hand of one of them placed across the bus window, seen from outside.

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Indrapramit Das @indrapramitdas.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

ANIARA (2018), a stunning Swedish-Danish adaptation of Harry Martinson's epic poem of the same name (1956), about a starship adrift, becoming crucible & microcosm for humanity's own journey through the universe, & our existential despair at our apparent solitude in it--the silence of 'god'.

Still from Aniara, showing a white brunette woman sitting on the floor of what appears to be a yellow void.

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Indrapramit Das @indrapramitdas.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

BACKROOMS; at its best, captures the aberrant, gamified lure of capitalism's 'memory' of the past, a copy of a copy for us to chase into Moloch's labyrinth as the present decays. At its worst, clumsy with its characters & words. Its incompleteness beguiling, to me. I liked it.

Still from Backrooms, showing what looks like a strip mall with chain stores/restaurants, but with the signs looking wrong--nonsensical, glitchy. Instead of a parking lot in front, there is carpeted floor, upon which shopping carts are strewn, some merging into the ground, and trees grow under the yellow light of not a sky, but an office ceiling with light panels.

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Indrapramit Das @indrapramitdas.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

SERPENT'S PATH (1998); a revenge thriller & claustrophobic crime drama/morality play warping at the edges into something absurd/mysterious; a physics teacher creating a little self-enclosed hell in 'our' world. The central 'crime' here is ghastly, a psychic wound swallowing those complicit.

Still from Serpent's Path (1998); a man kneeling in silhouette against a bank of CRT TV screens showing a little Japanese girl among greenery. The rest of the frame is shadow.

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Indrapramit Das @indrapramitdas.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

Billy Zane's never been more repulsive, compellingly watchable as always as a horrid chap (predatory art student vibes). But damn, they really knew how to make artfully beautiful B-grade thrillers back in the day. Not a shot out of place. Noice work, Noyce (sorry).

Still from Dead Calm; young Billy Zane, shirtless, grabbing a young Nicole Kidman under the chin and getting up close to her face from behind creepily, under bright sunlight on a boat.

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Indrapramit Das @indrapramitdas.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

DEAD CALM (1989); wanted to watch a Sam Neill (RIP) movie I hadn't seen in full. He's great in it, but Nicole Kidman was 19 in this? Goddamn, a talent fully formed even then. The kind of character/perf that doesn't need badass quips to convey competence, courage (all the more for her vulnerability).

Still from Dead Calm; a sailboat (yacht?) glows white against the black sea and night sky at night, stars sprinkled across the dark, a flare blooming and casting red violet reflections on the waves.

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Indrapramit Das @indrapramitdas.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

You can help save Amir's mother's eyesight, & help his family survive Israel's genocide, by sharing & donating: chuffed.org/project/help...

Graphic with photos of a Palestinian woman with an eye patch, lying down, with her son Amir, a young man, next to her, and a crying boy, Amir's brother Sanad, next to her as well. Text: 'Save my mother's sight. She can only see with one eye. She is in pain every single day. We need your help before it's too late. My mother is suffering from a severe eye disease. She can only see with one eye. The other eye is bleeding inside. She needs urgent treatment & expensive eye drops. Every day her pain gets worse. We need 120 pounds for her medicine. 'I'm the only one trying to protect my family. My father is ill & cannot work. We are 7 people living in a tent in Mawasi Khan Younis. No medicine. No treatment. No hope... except you.'

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Indrapramit Das @indrapramitdas.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

Cronenberg's NAKED LUNCH by Hajime Sorayama.

Poster for Naked Lunch, showing a figure sitting on a black box obscured under a white sheet, with something on top of them, visible poking out of the sheet are the figure's slender, pale bare legs, one of them with a stocking (or layer of skin?) peeling down to the ankle, and the butt and spindly legs of a giant insect that is sitting on the figure's lap (and also obscured by the sheet). The poster's background is white, with vivid red kanji on top, with smaller black kanji falling down like flakes of ash.

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Indrapramit Das @indrapramitdas.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

As always, when sex scene discourse begins, always remember Paul Verhoeven on whether sex scenes are necessary in movies: 'Nothing is necessary in movies.'* *Any art.

Still from Benedetta. A slender brunette white woman, nude, straddling an older blonde white woman wearing a night gown. The blonde woman reaches up to feel the brunette's breast.

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Indrapramit Das @indrapramitdas.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

THE FURIOUS was 🔥🔥🔥 better MORTAL KOMBAT adaptation than MORTAL KOMBAT (2021); the barely-there plot, brutal brawls, everyone regenerating from critical injuries, the bosses (Brian Le's Ho reminded me of Goro), combos upon combos. Absolutely astonishing how did they do that choreo & physical perfs.

Still from The Furious, showing actor/martial artist Miao Xie dressed in black and poised on a pile of goons with a hammer raised inside an MMA ring/octagon.

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Indrapramit Das @indrapramitdas.bsky.social · 20/06/2026

Google's Terms of Service now has an Indian version just for our very special draconian online police state.

'If you're based in India, we also added new reporting language about our obligations if you violate applicable law.'

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Indrapramit Das @indrapramitdas.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

DISCLOSURE DAY is a cracking 90s throwback thriller directed with all the audiovisual dynamism one expects of Spielberg et al, couched in a less successful religious epic about 2 prophets, its climactic revelations delivered in the unwondrous language of contemporary cable news/YT conspiracy vids.

Still from Disclosure Day, showing a man in a police uniform from behind looking up at a bright UFO hovering close to the ground above joshua trees in a dusky desert.

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Indrapramit Das @indrapramitdas.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

Mango season at Burrabazar, almost closing time. North Kolkata, not far from a little shop where you can buy bhang, aka cannabis paste (edible), in a corner of the market redolent with garbage. Cheapest drug in the world. Probably.

Photo of a bazaar with stalls of mangoes under green light, and pedestrians on the footpath, all amid a dense urban lattice of scaffolding, wires, and buildings in north Kolkata.

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Indrapramit Das @indrapramitdas.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

A tiny friend of the street among passers by.

Photo of a little brownish-grey-white cat sitting on a footpath/pavement by the feet of pedestrians.

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Indrapramit Das @indrapramitdas.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

My eyes keep clinging to the spots where I see the city unmolested as yet by the regime. Everywhere I go, placards with our hideous new Chief Minister's face like a god. The BJP/saffron flags only grow in number. I hope the city will stay alive.

Photo of an elderly man in shirt and trousers leaning against a rail by the side of a road in central Kolkata, in front of a stall brightly lit with flourescent lights, selling shirts. By him is a lamppost wrapped in haphazard wires. Above the street level stalls are visible the minarets of a yellow and green mosque against the black night sky.

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Indrapramit Das @indrapramitdas.bsky.social · 06/06/2026

Received my copy of @jonathanstrahan.bsky.social's THE BOOK OF THE DEAD (@harpervoyagerus.bsky.social), w/ my story 'Passengers'; high school students on a night train through '90s Bengal encounter unexpected violence that leads their journey into the event horizon of death's country.

Cover for the anthology The Book of the Dead, edited by Jonathan Strahan, Illustrated by Galen Dara. Title and credits in white text over a painting of a skull-faced, stylised apparition wreathed in ectoplasmic robes hovering against a night sky and crowned by the moon, with the dark shape of a hill and a tombstone behind it.

First page of my story 'Passengers', with the opening text: We sat in the close quarters of a winter-cooled train compartment, huddled together for warmth. Boys and girls, closer to each other’s bodies than we’d ever been. Our feet nestled next to each other, thighs and hips brushing. It was the first time most of us—class 9 students all—were travelling without parents, the first time I would travel beyond Calcutta with friends. Beyond the windows was blackness, engraved with our reflections on the scratched glass shutters, distant villages in invisible countryside flying past like fireflies. Cold air rushing from the gaps under the shutters with the dewy smell of earth. Eight teenagers in a compartment with six berths. Too many—the illicit thrill of breaking rules. But we wanted, needed to be close. Puberty had changed everything, much to the anxiety of teachers chaperoning for the trip. Blankets covered a multitude of legs as warm, damp paper boxes of Indian Railways food were passed around and earphones shared from a circulating Discman, music and conversation overlaying the rhythm of the train’s clattering beat and motion. We played bluff with cards on the sagging valley created by a blanket stretched over two rows of seats.

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Indrapramit Das @indrapramitdas.bsky.social · 06/06/2026

So much respect for this young man. I don't think I could face such relentless state repression and abuse with this much dignity and composure. This is him about to return to prison after 3 days of (restricted) freedom to see his mother through surgery.

Photo of Umar Khalid, a young Indian man with close cropped black hair and beard in glasses, wearing a white t-shirt that reads '[You can cage the singer but not the song]' and showing the peace sign as he prepares to return to prison.

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Indrapramit Das @indrapramitdas.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

BATMAN VS. SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE (2016); this was around the time I was losing patience with the MCU's quippy pap, & Snyder's mommy issues melodrama (Martha! Is Superman daddy?) taps into a mythic anti-gravitas I found more amusing & weird than any of the MCUs at the time. Luthor piss jar.

Heavy armour Batman with glowing eyes in the rain from Batman vs Superman Dawn of Justice

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