I think I began to think about sport and nationalism a couple of years ago, when the Indian cricket team decided to take the field wearing specially commissioned military fatigue caps. This was Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s idea and Virat Kohli, who was captain by then, supported it enthusiastically. The gesture was made in solidarity with the… Read More Mukul Kesavan: The Nation State and Modern Sport
In April 2020, Facebook purchased a 10-percent stake in Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Jio, the telecommunications arm of the Reliance empire. In addition to dominating telecom, Reliance is the largest player in petrochemicals and in retail. When its latest acquisition is complete, the company will control 40 percent – a large plurality – of India’s organised groceries sector. That could… Read More DANIEL BLOCK: How the Facebook-Reliance combine and the farm laws pave the way for digital colonisation
Pulitzer Prize-winning Indian photojournalist Danish Siddiqui was killed on Friday while covering a clash between Afghan security forces and Taliban fighters near a border crossing with Pakistan. Working for Reuters since 2010, Siddiqui covered the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Rohingya refugees crisis, the Hong Kong protests and Nepal earthquakes. Siddiqui was part of… Read More Danish Siddiqui: Remembering India's Pulitzer prize-winning photographer
Blaming ‘the system’ alone for Fr. Swamy’s death obscures how India’s political economy is linked to deprival. When an officer from the National Investigation Agency (NIA) came to interrogate Father Stan Swamy last monsoon, the Jesuit sociologist, then 83, in turn asked him about police integrity, and why a father-son duo (P. Jayaraj and Bennicks)… Read More Chitrangada Choudhury: In a passing, the larger picture of dispossession
Just 56m or 1% of adults out of 5.3bn globally are millionaires in net wealth terms. And they own 45% of all global personal wealth. The other 99% own the rest and there are nearly 3bn people in the world that have little or no wealth at all (after debts are deducted). Every year I… Read More Michael Roberts: 1% own 45% of the world’s personal wealth while nearly 3bn people have little or none / Fouâd Oveisy: On the Authoritarian Turn of Global Capital
The most-quoted statement about the Naxal insurgency to demand an ‘all-out assault’ on the rebels, a statement that is again in currency following the recent Naxal attack in Chhattisgarh, has come from a prime minister not really known for his assertiveness. But what complicates the irony are the events before Manmohan Singh termed Naxals the “single biggest internal security… Read More ASHUTOSH BHARDWAJ: Latest war cries against Naxals are absurd. Go visit Bastar, a war is already on
A Korean palm oil giant has been rejected from the world’s leading green certification body in the wake of a BBC investigation. The BBC had earlier found evidence that the Korindo group had been buying up swathes of Asia’s largest remaining rainforests in the remote Indonesian province of Papua. A visual analysis suggested that fires had then… Read More Korindo: Korean palm oil giant stripped of sustainability status
AT THE START of India’s struggle with the COVID-19 pandemic, the Aditya Birla Group and Vedanta Limited were among the first corporate donors to the PM CARES Fund—the emergency-relief fund helmed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which his government has shielded from all public scrutiny amid questions over how it has been managed and spent. Within… Read More MAHESH DONIA – Profit and Gloss Massive concealment of production and profits by aluminium giants
On the Christmas afternoon of 2006, Nao visited me again, accompanied by his son and, to my surprise, volunteered to narrate a new story of Juro, the headhunter. I shelved my linguistic work and sat down with my notebook. He instructed me, to my amusement, to switch on the recorder. He wanted in return a… Read More Anvita Abbi: Ten rare stories and 46 songs of the Great Andamanese
A sessions court in Delhi on Tuesday imposed a fine of Rs 25,000 on the police in a case related to the violence in the national Capital in February 2020, Bar and Bench reported. Additional Sessions Judge Vinod Yadav of the Karkardooma Court said that the investigation carried out in the matter was “callous and farcical”. The court was… Read More Delhi violence: Court pulls up police for “callous and farcical” investigation, imposes Rs 25,000 as fine
After the truth-shower 