Sai Mukhesh Harmony and hatred can coexist within individuals, at the same time, from different religious communities. This is not a matter of harmony being present in the distant past, only to be replaced by hatred after some incident. In the Indian subcontinent—with a long history of communal tensions—it is difficult to understand what the… Read More इत्तिहाद (Ittiḥād)
NB: This is the text of the talk I delivered on October 2 at the Gandhi Peace Foundation, New Delhi. DS The bane of our life is our exclusive provincialism, whereas my province must be co-extensive with the Indian boundary so that ultimately it extends to the boundary of the earth. Else it perishes – Mahatma Gandhi,… Read More The Oceanic Circle: Talk on the occasion of Mahatma Gandhi’s 155th birthday
The RSS legal front’s increasing hold over the judicial system “The project ahead is to determine how a new constitution could be created—who should be a part of this new project. The Constitution can be overthrown,” said an ABAP member and a former assistant solicitor general. Sushovan Patnaik ON THE EVENING OF 5 SEPTEMBER, a fleet… Read More Lowering the Bar
Historical Origins of the War in Palestine GAZA casualties, live statistics United Nations Documentation on the Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide The war in Palestine has three players: Israel; the USA, with its European satellites fully backing Israel; and Palestinians, isolated, a people… Read More Historical Origins of the War in Palestine: Lecture by Madhavan K. Palat
Gideon Levy Israel is turning, with alarming speed, into a country that lives on blood. The daily crimes of the occupation are already less relevant. Over the past year, a new reality of mass killing and crimes of an entirely different scale has emerged. We are in a genocidal reality; the blood of tens of… Read More Israelis Must Ask Themselves if They’re Willing to Live in a Country That Lives on Blood
‘Existential threat’ is a thin excuse: the out-of-control force that is pushing the Middle East to the brink is Israel itself Nesrine Malik Acommon defence of Israel’s belligerence, both within the Palestinian territories and in the wider region, is the claim that it must act in this way because it is surrounded by countries that are trying… Read More With Gaza in ruins and Lebanon under siege, what defence remains for Israel’s actions?
First posted May 01, 2016 NB: The Berrigan brothers represent the best in the tradition of non-violent resistance to war and bellicose nationalism. Here is what they said in a public statement issued at the height of the Vietnam war, in 1968: “We confront the Catholic Church, other Christian bodies and the synagogues of America with their… Read More Daniel Berrigan, Defiant Priest Who Preached Pacifism Dies at 94 (2016) / Catonsville 9 Statement written by Dan Berrigan, S.J.
DOCUMENTS: BOOKS: IMAGE & SOUND: Editor’s Picks: o o Books of Note:
Keki Daruwalla Perhaps I’ll wake up on some alien shoreIn the shimmer of an aluminium dawn,to find the sea talking to itselfand rummaging among the lines I’ve drawn;looking for something, a voyager perhaps,gnarled as a thorn tree in whose loving hands,these map lines of mine, somnambulant,will wake and pulse and turn to shoreline, sand. The… Read More Map-maker
Even if our brains are not up to the task of appreciating all the connections that relate to quality of air, water, nutrients, soils, etc., these things are still vitally important. In other words, we would be tragically foolish to imagine living without insects, plankton, microbes, fish, birds, etc., and the uncountable and unknowable interrelationships between… Read More Certainty
After the truth-shower 