Image by by Dimmis Vart on Unsplash
After we finalised flow as the theme for the 23rd edition of हाकारा | Hākārā, I had excitedly anticipated submissions on time, nature, and memories. When I think of the current theme, I think of something unbridled and inevitable. Something that is free and relentless enough to find its own path, persistent despite hiccups. It is the movement of thoughts and emotions, the chain of events that transcend intention, the slow, dependable certainty of time and seasons. Flow is potent. It can soothe and erode, widen and restrict, join and divide. Flow seems something that can be met with attention instead of control.
However, the works we had the privilege to read enriched my perception and understanding of flow in ways I had not expected or imagined. I learnt how flow moves through homes, bodies, and policies—and how it sometimes simply refuses to move at all.
In Vedanti Hindurao’s The Flow of Embodiment, faith flows like a fragrance through a home—songs, objects, and gestures traveling across generations even when the belief changes and thins. Continuity no longer stays doctrinal but transforms into a choreography, a muscle memory.
Neha Ayub’s The Rhythms of a River answers from the riverbank: flow meanders, stalls, and loops back, reminding us that pauses and refusals are also part of a relentlessly flowing current. These works highlight that identity is not a linear channel but a delta—sedimenting, eroding, occasionally losing its very axis and finding it again. These are love letters to flow as memory-in-motion, and to the dignity of its pauses.
Anuja Dasgupta’s On Rangjon further widens the field. Mountains, often taken as symbols of stillness, reveal themselves as motion across deep time—uplift, erosion, freeze and thaw. Light itself becomes a daily river as shadows move. A choice for slower, black-and-white film makes looking a practice of patience, so the work’s method enacts the very flow it reveals.
The color blue usually invaded my mind as soon as I thought of Flow. However, after Neha’s river and Anuja’s mountains, the palette broke open. The river’s bends carry silt-green and dusk-violet while the mountain range holds slate, ash, and sudden silver.
Aranya’s A Kind of Home gathers five poems that expand the idea of flow again through sound, music, swarm, and city. Together, these poems show that flow is not only water and time; it is how signals travel, how crowds gather, and how repetition becomes undertow.
The issue also turns to the kind of flow that is managed and controlled more than being natural. They highlight how infrastructure makes and unmakes movement. Sanskriti’s Accounts of the Border explores the movement across Indian borderlands, where checkpoints, permits, and the repeal of older regimes act like valves. When formal channels close, rumor becomes a kind of infrastructure: a whispered route, a warning carried faster than any paper. Even the sky is a corridor that is patrolled and claimed. In her essay, flow is friction where life continues to move under pressure, finding room in the seams.
Asfia’s Waste Flows shows us how, contrary to our myopic perception, waste never really sits still. It undergoes a horizontal journey that we manage — trucks, routes, segregation centers — and a vertical one we conveniently ignore: a dark river seeping down through soil for years. Women workers keep this stream in motion with their hands, turning “throwaways” into valuable goods while carrying stigma on their bodies. Incineration promises disappearance, yet the essay asks what it means to call a fire a solution. Here, flow is designed, counted, and often hidden; it reveals who profits and who absorbs the cost.
Two works face the most intimate and difficult currents. Aadrit Banerjee’s poem 843 begins with “drip, drop, drop” and sets sugarcane juice beside blood and desire. It questions what keeps sweetness flowing and at what price. Sarveshwari Saikrishna’s Caged Animals places us between a zoo’s feeding schedule and a family’s visit. Rules retain the flow—gates opening, timetables met—while harm still travels on. A child watches. A bottle of orange Fanta failing to rinse the image away.
Ashutosh Potdar’s Marathi translation of Kary Barclay’s Asexuality in Translation: ‘Can I Hold You?’ Across Linguistic Borders traces meaning as it flows across tongues. Words carve new channels in Arabic, Spanish, and Marathi; genres are rerouted when a “rom-com” becomes an aromantic, platonic comedy. Naming a current against the conventional flow of compulsory sexuality opens space for different forms of closeness to move.
We invite you to read, engage, and reflect on these remarkable masterpieces that have left us with questions instead of conclusions: What makes a flow natural, and who decides its direction and speed? Where does flow end and exploitation begin—across bodies, places, and systems? Does flow neglect consent and to what extent? What becomes visible and what is hidden when we call a current “natural”? Who is smoothed forward by a seamless surface, and who bears the cost beneath it? How do we measure movement without flattening what matters? Does flow level inequalities or perpetuate it? When do boundaries protect, and when do they simply redraw the channel? What does a current remember? What does it carry, and what does it wash away? Is repair a matter of slowing and widening a flow, or of rerouting it altogether? How do we listen to more-than-human currents with care? Which flows should we teach, design, and resist?
And what might it mean, finally, to live well in motion?