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

Americans are starting to get it: we can’t let Trump – or Trumpism – back in office

Austin Sarat and Dennis Aftergut Polls and election results over the last week reminded Americans that politics seldom moves in a straight line. As in physics, action produces reaction. Overreach invites backlash. For a long while former President Trump and his cronies seemed to be immune from this rule of political life and from the consequences of even the… Read More Americans are starting to get it: we can’t let Trump – or Trumpism – back in office

Dilip

Evil

I know he had unusual eyesWhose powers no orders could determineNot to mistake the men he sawAs others did, for gods or vermin (Thomas Gunn, on a German soldier who risked his life to save Jews from deportation to the camps. Cited by Terry Eagleton, in Ideology, Verso, 1991, 2007; p xxii). What persuades men… Read More Evil

Dilip

The edge of oblivion

First posted September 6, 2013 The edge of oblivion  – by Dilip Simeon(The Tribune Sept 6, 2013) The primitive mind is, in the fullest meaning of the word, imperishable: Sigmund Freud, 1915 The choice today is no longer between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence: Martin Luther King, 1958 Do the tense thoughts of… Read More The edge of oblivion

Dilip

Avay Shukla on the Bilkis Bano case: How much further can we sink as a Nation?

Nothing reveals better the depths to which we have sunk as a nation and a polity than the remission granted to the 11 convicts in the Bilkis Bano case, and the events surrounding this depraved decision. One can’t help but notice that the muted reaction to the release of these rapists/ murderers is in sharp… Read More Avay Shukla on the Bilkis Bano case: How much further can we sink as a Nation?

Dilip

Simon Leys: The View from the Bridge. His lectures on Learning, Reading, Writing and Going Abroad and Staying Home (1996)

First posted August 4, 2018 In 1996, Professor Pierre Ryckmans (Simon Leys) presented the ABC Boyer Lectures. Subsequently published under the title The View from the Bridge the lectures were serialised in four parts in China Heritage Quarterly with the permission of the author. The first lecture was called Learning (some introductory paragraphs are given below; but the link will… Read More Simon Leys: The View from the Bridge. His lectures on Learning, Reading, Writing and Going Abroad and Staying Home (1996)

Dilip

Simon Leys: The art of interpreting non-existent inscriptions written in invisible ink on a blank page. Book review

History might have been very different if the original leaders of the Chinese Communist Party had not been decimated by Chiang Kai-shek’s White Terror of 1927, or expelled by their own comrades in subsequent party purges. They were civilised and sophisticated urban intellectuals, upholding humanistic values, with cosmopolitan and open minds, attuned to the modern… Read More Simon Leys: The art of interpreting non-existent inscriptions written in invisible ink on a blank page. Book review

Dilip