NB: An extraordinary film by one of India’s most talented film-makers. What I saw were three visual metaphors: an eclipse of the sun which never lifted; a professor entering a dark place to contemplate darkness; and an armed woman waiting silently for something unspeakable. For me, the first metaphor signified the contemporary planetary condition; the… Read More Amar Kanwar: Such A Morning
By Sharda Ugra You know the Ahmedabad summer has turned brutal when mirages begin to pop up on city roads. Horizons shimmer seductively, tricking the mind and the eye, sending them stumbling around trying to separate illusion from what is real. Somewhat like what was built around the first day of the India v Australia Test… Read More The Modi Stadium Metaverse: Half Full Or Just Empty?
I was walking a trail today when I spotted this juvenile actively self-feeding. No adults were in attendance and no calls were heard. The bird was feeding largely by aerial-sallying from perches and snatching caterpillars and insects from the tree foliage. Prey was extensively branch-swiped before being eaten and the bird would land on a… Read More Pale Blue Flycatcher
Narendra Modi posed for the cameras holding a photograph of Narendra Modi in Ahmedabad’s Narendra Modi stadium… lets lose ourselves in this “bottomless sinkhole of North Korean narcissism” Mukul Kesavan It isn’t unusual for prime ministers of cricket-mad nations to sidle into the frame, to photobomb the cricket. During a Commonwealth heads of government meeting… Read More Cult over cricket
Ferenc Laczó An anarchist philosopher turned right-leaning libertarian and anti-capitalist critic of the illiberal order, Gáspár Miklós Tamás (1948–2023) embodied what east European thinkers have tended to be best at: making paradoxes intelligible. Democracy is ‘an odd thing to be glad about all on one’s own,’ Gáspár Miklós Tamás quipped in the late 1990s, and… Read More Rhapsody of emancipation: the interventions of Gáspár Miklós Tamás
A first-of-its-kind municipal climate charter in Texas could throw a wrench in US fossil fuel extraction. Residents of a major Texas city just west of the Permian Basin, the largest oil field in the US, will have the chance to vote on the package this spring. If the proposal passes, the city of El Paso would adopt a comprehensive… Read More Texas youth organizers take aim at the biggest oil field in the US
NB: The memory of these young people, their indomitable courage and humanity in resisting the criminal Nazi regime always brings tears to my eyes. They have left us something priceless: the belief in an undefeated human conscience. Goodbye Traute, and good bye again Sophie and Hans and all your comrades on the White Rose. Thank… Read More Traute Lafrenz, the last of the White Rose anti-Nazi resistance, dies aged 103
Bichhdā kuchh is adā se ki rut hī badal gaī / ik shaḳhs saare shahr ko vīrān kar gayā – Khalid Sharif He parted in such a way that the season has changed / A whole city stands deserted by one man’s departure Kishore Saint, Ashish Kothari, Aseem Shrivastava “Ahimsa and Truth are my two lungs.… Read More The Sacred Ecology of Ahimsa
Rahamath Tarikere and Chandan Gowda talk about philosophy, culture, resistance and syncretism in some traditions in Karnataka. Tarikere worked as professor of Kannada literature at Kannada University, Hampi from 1992 until his retirement in 2021. His extensive publications, which include literary and cultural criticism, travel writing as well as short essays on wide ranging matters,… Read More Dissent, Diversity Run Deep in Karnataka and in Indian Philosophy: A Conversation
By Liam Barrett In an interview for the Guardian last week, MSNBC broadcaster Mehdi Hasan launched a broadside against Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News. Fox is less of a news channel, Hasan said, than “a propaganda arm of the Republican Party.” Hasan accused Murdoch of overseeing the “degradation of our democracy and media.” His criticisms mirror a general distrust of the mainstream… Read More Rupert Murdoch’s press empire is a threat to democracy
After the truth-shower 