Author: Dilip

I'm a scholar, writer and teacher; and my blog is designed for intellectual exploration. It carries no advertisements and requires no cash subscription

Punishing victims, rewarding perpetrators: The Supreme Court’s creative contortions

The Babri Masjid ruling inaugurated a pattern where the Court berated the government or its favoured party, which still ended up on the winning side. Girish Shahane “The attempt to abrogate Article 370 is likely to meet its end in the Supreme Court”. That’s a line from a column I wrote after the Indian government radically changed… Read More Punishing victims, rewarding perpetrators: The Supreme Court’s creative contortions

Dilip

Against homogenisation: Advancing diversity through Democratic Confederalism

The homogenic national society is the most artificial society to have ever been created and is the result of the “social engineering project… Due to its bureaucratic nature, Statism needs the homogenisation of space and time to function. It requires that within its borders, cultures and ways of life are melted into one singular artificial… Read More Against homogenisation: Advancing diversity through Democratic Confederalism

Dilip

Kurdish solidarity crackdown

How “anti-terror” laws used to silence meaningful dissent and solidarity with oppressed peoples. ~ Arîn Qereçox In January 2019, I travelled to Syria to learn about the revolution unfolding in the country’s north since 2012. At the time, we called it the Rojava Revolution, as the land being held by revolutionary forces was roughly the… Read More Kurdish solidarity crackdown

Dilip

What the West gets wrong on Stalin and Putin

The Western tendency to reduce mass-scale crime to an omnipotent leader has always been a misleading one. Even Stalinism was not the work of one man, but of the security services and individuals willing to denounce their fellow neighbors for housing rights or petty grievances, as the Kyiv-born Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov so mercilessly satires in… Read More What the West gets wrong on Stalin and Putin

Dilip

What Happens in Ayodhya Doesn’t Stay in Ayodhya

Mrinal Pande A cluster of photos printed in a major English daily, the day after the week long rituals began in Ayodhya’s new Ram temple, confirms that our ‘Beti Padhao‘ and ‘Stree Sashkteekaran’ and various ‘Matru Kalyan Yojanas’ notwithstanding, the traditional gendered hierarchies remain firmly in place both on the streets and in the temple in Ayodhya. In… Read More What Happens in Ayodhya Doesn’t Stay in Ayodhya

Dilip

‘Baba’ – A Personal Tribute to Damodar Dharmanand Kosambi, by A. L. Basham

NB: D. D. Kosambi (1907-1966) was one of India’s most accomplished intellectuals. Hailing from Goa, he was a polyglot familiar with Konkani, Marathi, Hindi, Sanskrit, Pali, English, French, Italian and German (I may have missed some languages). He was a mathematician, statistician, geneticist, philologist, physicist, numismatist, archaeologist, historian and public intellectual (find a biography here). He… Read More ‘Baba’ – A Personal Tribute to Damodar Dharmanand Kosambi, by A. L. Basham

Dilip

The Houthis may have checkmated Biden in Red Sea standoff

Murtaza Hussain ISRAEL’S UNRELENTING ASSAULT on the Gaza Strip is beginning to tip the Middle East into a wider regional conflict. In the past week, the Houthis in Yemen emerged as an unlikely power player, successfully disrupting global shipping in the name of Palestinians in Gaza and goading the U.S. into launching a series of airstrikes… Read More The Houthis may have checkmated Biden in Red Sea standoff

Dilip

Pratap Bhanu Mehta: What January 22 is, what it isn’t

There are moments in history that appear to drive wave after wave of people in a great torrent of catharsis, ecstasy, emotion and an elevated group mood that almost all conventional analysis, historical categories, moral measures and political prognosis seem beside the point. It would be foolish to deny that the pran pratishtha of Ram Lalla… Read More Pratap Bhanu Mehta: What January 22 is, what it isn’t

Dilip

Toys from Trash: Teaching kids science using everyday objects / Visit Arvind Gupta’s Archive

First posted January 24, 2014 The road to the offices inside Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics’ (IUCAA) Children Science Centre in Pune passes through a well-set, well-manicured lawn past the administrative buildings of the place. The tranquil atmosphere of the campus is broken only by the chaos in the room opposite his office. Noisy… Read More Toys from Trash: Teaching kids science using everyday objects / Visit Arvind Gupta’s Archive

Dilip