Where in the world could the question of language politics be more relevant than in India? Colonisation’s trail invited a project of unification with a character and a scale unseen for centuries. If customs, cuisine, activities or traditions would tend to be at odds across regions, it is naturally languages that would rise to the surface as the most pressing concern. Languages of politics and governance, of course, but also, and especially, languages of the imaginary, of the fantastic and the mundane: languages of communities drawing their avenir. Piloting the creative drives of the millions, writers have been assuming the delicate task of arbitrating the dynamics of cultures, between unscripted patois, regionalisms, state languages and national vernaculars. And all this, in the midst of literary currents and aspirations crossing borders and millennia. Last week, India gave a final homage to an unmistakable voice, to a wordsmith symbolising an affirmation of the here within the all: UR Ananthamurthy. In our dialogue this week, Nikhil Govind evokes personal memories to portray an author whose passionate outspokenness was only equal to the constancy of his intellectual patience and to the depth of his commitment as a social figure. N Nagaraju celebrates the questions left by Ananthamurthy’s generation, and exalts the ‘hospitality’ that bridges languages.

“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” Albert Einstein’s intuition seemed confirmed too fast, except perhaps for the fact that a third World War was not needed to bring back our nations to the raw forms of physical violence. Congo, Sudan, Ukraine, Colombia, Gaza, Iraq, Syria and Thailand are many proofs of the fall of the Western dream of technological positivism, and of the vectorisation of fundamental interdependent global tensions as far as possible from the sanctuaries of welfare states. Spatial considerations, indeed! In fact, the profusion of ongoing conflicts must, first, call for a radical rethinking of the metaphysics of space. It is because war is an intensification of spaces, today’s reality of war must be used to prepare a simultaneous reality of beauty. Such an attempt would show that beauty is what makes the three-dimensionality of space possible: observation, action, and design. Beauty is the fundamental event that assembles the three elementary agents along an equilateral space. On the occasion of its thirtieth publication, LILA Inter-actions acknowledges its transformed nature and redefines itself as an online medium of translocal dialogues. Along with those millions of actors, this week, LILA Inter-actions brings you, indeed, a witness and a proxy player. Photojournalist Loulou d’Aki ponders on the sustenance and the ethics of the beautiful, as the observing lens virtualises and distances the space of the events away from the photographer. New Media expert Rich Rice looks at strategies of ‘the constellation of squares’, at the aesthetics of the motions in chess, to reveal how war and beauty are the two natural guests of space.