Month: September 2023

Nobel Peace Laureate: ‘We journalists are the defence line between dictatorship and war’ (2021)

Carole Cadwalladr The last time a journalist won a Nobel prize was 1935. The journalist who won it – Carl von Ossietzky – had revealed how Hitler was secretly rearming Germany. “And he couldn’t pick it up because he was languishing in a Nazi concentration camp,” says Maria Ressa over a video call from Manila. A Novaya… Read More Nobel Peace Laureate: ‘We journalists are the defence line between dictatorship and war’ (2021)

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‘Capitalism is dead. Now we have something much worse’: Yanis Varoufakis on extremism, Starmer, and the tyranny of big tech

We’re now in servitude to the fiefdoms of our new global masters, Lord Zuckerberg of Facelandia and Sir Musk of the rotten borough of X… Technofeudalism feels like an important new book. It’s a big-picture hypothesis rooted in a historical account of how capitalism came into being that describes what is happening in terms of an… Read More ‘Capitalism is dead. Now we have something much worse’: Yanis Varoufakis on extremism, Starmer, and the tyranny of big tech

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Communalism in Modern India: A Theoretical Examination (1986)

NB: This essay was written nearly 40 years ago, in the aftermath of the 1984 carnage of Sikhs in New Delhi. It was my first attempt at arguing that communalism was India’s version of Nazism, and that it was a singular phenomenon with different religious (and mutually influential) expressions, rather than an arithmetical total of… Read More Communalism in Modern India: A Theoretical Examination (1986)

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Dinanath Nadim: Kashmir’s forgotten poet by Mohan K. Tikku

First posted March 09, 2017 The most outstanding figure in 20th century Kashmiri literature has also been the least published poet of his generation. To his many readers and admirers, Dinanath Nadim has been a bit of a paradox. In a literary career extending over half a century, Nadim (1916-89) wrote a lot but published little. Partly,… Read More Dinanath Nadim: Kashmir’s forgotten poet by Mohan K. Tikku

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‘Mullah Terrorist’: BJP MP Ramesh Bidhuri Uses Slurs Against BSP MP Danish Ali in Lok Sabha

New Delhi: On Thursday (September 21) night, Bharatiya Janata Party Lok Sabha MP Ramesh Bidhuri used violent anti-Muslim slurs against his parliament colleague Danish Ali of the Bahujan Samaj Party. Bidhuri’s words were televised as part of the Lok Sabha proceedings. “Yeh ugrawaaadi (militant), yeh aatankwaadi hai (terrorist), ugrawaadi hai, yeh aantankwaadi hai,” Bidhuri can be heard shouting during the… Read More ‘Mullah Terrorist’: BJP MP Ramesh Bidhuri Uses Slurs Against BSP MP Danish Ali in Lok Sabha

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Quantum poetics: Borges and Heisenberg on language and reality

William Egginton As history’s bloodiest war metastasised from Europe outward, two men – a world apart from each other, and coming from profoundly different disciplines – converged on one fundamentally similar idea. One of the men was a poet and short-fiction writer with middling success in his own country but virtually unknown outside its borders.… Read More Quantum poetics: Borges and Heisenberg on language and reality

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‘Very messy’: India-Canada row over Sikh killing causes diplomatic shock waves

Hannah Ellis-Petersen in Delhi The sun was setting on a June evening as Hardeep Singh Nijjar walked across the car park of the gurdwara. Nijjar’s day job was as a plumber but this gurdwara, located in the city of Surrey, in Canada’s British Columbia province, was where he dedicated most of his energy. That day he… Read More ‘Very messy’: India-Canada row over Sikh killing causes diplomatic shock waves

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We are being poisoned every day, so why do we keep voting for more pollution? Ask a lobbyist

George Monbiot There are some things we rightly find intolerable, such as the possession of poorly trained, aggressive dogs. There are other things, whose impacts are many thousands of times worse, that we decide just to live with. What makes the difference? Visibility is one reason: a photo of a large dog with bared teeth… Read More We are being poisoned every day, so why do we keep voting for more pollution? Ask a lobbyist

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