Dear bleeding heart secularists,
I hope, despite having to nurse your recent wounds, you’re sitting somewhere safe in your psychological darkness that you have constructed around yourself.
Since lots of open letters are being written to Narendra Modi advising him how to respect the secular and pluralistic fabric of the country I thought well, why not I too participate in this stimulating epistolary exchange, and hence, this open letter.
I hope by now you have come to terms with the fact that there is going to be a “communal” government at the center despite your relentless pursuit to achieve the otherwise. If you haven’t, I hope you reconcile to the reality fast before emotional acidity leaves permanent scars on your personality.
Although you have given an interesting...
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Hi Maya,
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You don’t know me, but my name’s Alexis.
I recently heard you were forced to resign from your position as the first black, female student body president at Lawrenceville School—the most expensive private boarding school in the country—because you made fun of the typical “Lawrenceville boi” on Instagram by posting a photo of yourself in a Yale sweatshirt holding a hockey stick, adding hashtags such as “#confederate” and “#peakedinhighschool.”
Of course, it was meant to be a joke....
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Dear Open Letter Writers,
Good day, hope this open letter finds you in the best of spirits. The reason I am writing this is because I was a bit perturbed at the concept of an open letter, not to mention the recent spate of open letters going around in local newspapers these days, so I decided it best to engage in the practice of learning by doing rather than not doing anything and not learning at all either.
So I am writing an open letter, primarily because I don't completely understand what an open letter is supposed to imply (hopefully this will change as I inch closer towards filling up this endless page with words addressed to everyone, and no one in particular at the same time).
Open letters… what are they? And how can someone like me be writing an open letter without even...
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Dear Male Writers Who Struggle Creating Strong Female Characters,
Oh how I feel for you, trying to imagine the ever elusive sexy/smart/tough chick and bring her to life! You are a warrior, not unlike the great hunters who risk life and limb tracking Yeti or even Nessie herself. We silly women and our emotions; how you must suffer as you work around our imperfections! How relieved you must feel when you’re free to create male characters; they make no expressions, they’re tough and sexy, and free to be as unattractive as they like.
*insert screeching car sound here*
Let’s get real. The only thing difficult about creating strong female characters is force-filtering them through the heads of feeble minded men who insist on perpetuating antiquated ideas of what a woman is—of who she can be...
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Dear Loyal Good Wife Fans,
We, like you, mourn the loss of Will Gardner. And while Will is gone, our beloved Josh Charles is very much alive and remains an integral part of our family.
The Good Wife, at its heart, is the “Education of Alicia Florrick.” To us, there always was a tragedy at the center of Will and Alicia’s relationship: the tragedy of bad timing. And when faced with the gut punch of Josh’s decision, made over a year ago, to move on to other creative endeavors, we had a major choice to make.
We could “send him off to Seattle,” he could be disbarred, or get married, or go off to Borneo to do good works. But there was something in the passion that Will and Alicia shared that made distance a meager hurdle. The brutal honesty and reality of death speaks to the truth and...
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Dear Damion Crawford
I write to you as a fellow Jamaican. I could show you my passport to prove my Jamaicanness, but I do not know if you would accept that as credential enough. Most people, however, accept me as a Jamaican writer and academic. My 9 books to date have consistently thought through the complicated question of what it means to be Jamaican.
It is by no means an easy question to answer. Most of my work tries to expand the dangerously limiting ideas that are out there. At the University of Glasgow where I taught until recently, my students were mostly white and from the UK. They sometimes came to my lectures on Caribbean Literature with very naive ideas about the region. Sometimes they thought that we all looked like you and me – dreadlocked men – and that we were...
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Dear Chancellor Merkel,
On behalf of the International Association of Conference Interpreters (AIIC), the International Federation of Translators (FIT), the International Association of Professional Translators and Interpreters (IAPTI), the Bundesverband der Dolmetscher und Übersetzer (BDÜ), and Red T, a non-profit organization dedicated to the protection of translators and interpreters in high-risk settings, we urge you to grant protective asylum to Afghan host nation linguists who served the Bundeswehr.
Germany has been a leader among the coalition forces in Afghanistan and local interpreters were vital to its mission. Now, however, it lags behind other nations in creating expedited visa procedures and offering asylum in recognition of the risks their Afghan linguists now face. In...
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Dear Karen,
It does my heart well to see you on the news and hear you on radio, doing interviews about the mayoral race and the future of the Chicago Public Schools. It's great to see you back on the front lines, despite your unfortunate battle with brain cancer. I continue to pray for your full recovery. God is able!
As a charter school teacher, I was initially intimidated by you and reluctant to engage. I feared that you would outright dismiss me as some naïve education reformer, or, worse, demonize me as a pawn for some greedy corporation who just wants to profit from privatizing public education.
Instead, you listened to me. You challenged me. You read my blogs and took the time to write me brief but enormously encouraging emails (except for that one exchange on Twitter, but...
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Dear Sam Maguire,
The UKIP Association of the University of York read with interest your blog post dated 27th November, 2014. Firstly, we were keenly disappointed that you did not think it necessary to contact us before you published your blog post. It is common courtesy and common practice to do so. We have a number of questions and would be grateful for your clarification.
1 – You write, “I want to reassure those who are concerned that I and YUSU have a commitment to equality of opportunity at the University of York.” and that “I, personally, don’t believe that UKIP national leadership, shares these values. “. If these are your personal views, then is your official blog as YUSU President really the appropriate medium to convey them?
In addition, we fail to see how the national...
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Dear Mr Arnab Goswami,
We, the undersigned, who have on many occasions participated in the 9pm. News Hour programme on Times Now, anchored by you , wish to raise concerns about the shrinking space in this programme for reasoned debate and the manner in which it has been used to demonise people’s movements and civil liberties activists.
On 17th and 18th February 2015, in the News Hour show, a section of activists were invited to contribute to the debate on the “offloading” of Greenpeace representative Priya Pillai. Right from the start, the activists were denied the right to articulate their views. Not only were their mikes at times muted, they were repeatedly heckled and subjected to hate speech, with you, as the anchor, encouraging, even orchestrating and amplifying these responses...
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