The Cockroach Janta Party won this battle partly because the legions it led seemed armoured with an alloy of innocence and insouciance. This had something to do with how young they were Mukul Kesavan It was the 6th of June. Abhijeet Dipke had set out his stall at Jantar Mantar after returning from Boston. I… Read More Dawn for democracy
NB: RSS ideology combined with an eagerness of communal activists to intimidate citizens on flimsy excuses must not be allowed to gain domination over the juridical sphere. Judges and magistrates who behave as if they are adjuncts of the Sanghi moral police are demeaning themselves; and bringing Indian justice into disrepute. Thanks are due to… Read More Students are jailed for merely protesting; bail denied even for having biryani on Ganga boat trip: Justice Ujjal Bhuyan
NB: India’s students and their parents, young sympathisers and well wishers deserve congratulations and gratitude from the whole country for confronting this irresponsible, brutal and corrupt government with enormous courage and stamina. They have made a historic contribution to the preservation of Indian democracy by throwing fear and cowardice to the winds. I salute all… Read More जश्न में डूबा जंतर-मंतर, देश भर में ख़ुशी की लहर, वाह जेन ज़ी वाह, कर दिया कमाल / Gen Z जीता, Modi की सबसे बड़ी हार, Dharmendra Pradhan का इस्तीफ़ा
NB: Listen to Arvind Anjum’s interviews with the new arrivals at the protest site. Pakistani youth express their admiration and solidarity with struggling Indian students: BBC report. DS The protest has convincingly established not just the irrelevance of legacy TV channels but also their continued abandonment of basic journalistic norms Kalpana Sharma There were broken… Read More The media missed the biggest story: How a generation fed on consumerism and hate found its voice
Fear evaporates as India’s youth confront State power on streets. There were 152 paper leaks in the last 10 years with zero convictions Bharat Bhushan Pan India protests against the events of July 20 have marked a significant shift in Indian politics, moribund for 12 years under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. What began as a narrow protest about examination… Read More Bharat Bhushan: Exam anger becomes a political reckoning
How the RSS is infiltrating India’s intellectual spaces NB: The Caravan article below indicates why the Modi government was so reluctant to dismiss the Education Minister. News Flash: Pradhan submitted his resignation a few hours ago. Read his statement here. It took over a month of agitation by millions of students and also overseas Indians… Read More The Takeover (2019)
Separating truth from fiction in the most successful African movie of all time Carey Baraka 1. To talk about The Gods Must Be Crazy, we have to start with the VHS tapes. We didn’t have many of them when I was growing up in Kisumu, a port city in western Kenya on the banks of Lake… Read More The Gods Are Still Crazy
Taiwanese people look on with concern at fate of Hong Kong’s independent booksellers, after series of arrests in recent months Amy Hawkins and Yu-chen Li in Taipei Walking out of one of Hong Kong’s last remaining independent bookstores, hands behind her back but head held high, the woman’s T-shirt was emblazoned with a simple slogan: “I am a bookstore… Read More ‘A statement of freedom’: T-shirt slogan goes viral and book sales rocket in Taiwan after Hong Kong raids
Watch “आधी रात नेहा शर्मा ने दिल्ली पुलिस के लाठीचार्ज पर जो बोला उसे पूरे देश को देखना चाहिए!” on YouTube The regime — and the silence — often made me wonder whether I’m completely crazy for coming back… But today — to see this democratic spirit which has been silenced for so long come… Read More Yogendra Yadav: ‘I was part of the protest march in Delhi. Democratic politics took a new turn’
As the far right fulminates about who ‘belongs’ in Britain, let’s remember Fritz Lustig, who arrived here in 1939, just months before war broke out. Initially jailed as an ‘enemy alien’, he played a vital role in a top-secret military intelligence unit Robin Lustig When the Nazis came to power in Germany in January 1933, Fritz Lustig,… Read More My father, the German refugee who fought the Nazis as a ‘secret listener’
After the truth-shower 