Nuno P. Monteiro and Fritz Bartel, eds., Before and after the fall: world politics and the end of the Cold War, Cambridge, 2021 Reviewed by Lorenzo Cladi In this volume, Nuno Monteiro and Fritz Bartel bring together a vast array of scholars. They all get to grips with the issue of continuity and change with… Read More Before and after the fall: World politics & the end of the Cold War
NB: In 1953, eight years after the end of the Second World War and the partition of Germany, there took place an uprising of workers against abysmal working conditions and low wages in the Communist-ruled German Democratic Republic. The uprising was brutally crushed, and soon afterwards the famous left-wing playright and poet Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956),… Read More The Solution: Bertolt Brecht
NB: In other words, the BJP/RSS government is now selecting the electorate. As Bertold Brecht wrote in his poem The Solution, (1953) on the East German government’s despotic ways: Perhaps the government ought to dissolve the people and elect another? DS Exercises like the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls presage a state of affairs… Read More When the State Always Doubts Your Identity; or disenfranchising India’s citizens
Santhosh Mathew “History often rewards those who speak for the voiceless,even when their words are unwelcome.”On his 200th birth anniversary, Dadabhai Naoroji stands tall not merely as a nationalist icon,but as a polymath, thinker, parliamentarian, social reformer, and above all, the conscience-keeper of colonial India. If today Shashi Tharoor reminds the world that India once… Read More Dadabhai Naoroji at 200: The Grand Old Man Who Exposed an Empire’s Loot
++++++Readers outside of India can donate here to support Mainstream Weeklyhttps://tinyurl.com/2rsy4ss6++++++ In this Issue: BOOKS IMAGE & SOUND Editor’s Picks: Books of Note: Source: MAINSTREAM
New Delhi spent decades cosying up to the US. The truth is, Washington doesn’t have allies outside the west – it has clients. What changed was that over the past quarter of a century, India’s political class began to see the US as the country’s natural partner. It was the main destination of India’s exports… Read More Blindsided by Trump, Modi is learning hard lessons about India’s place in the new world order
NB: Judicial conscience requires human backbone DS For the state, Umar Khalid and others are worse than heinous criminals All those charged with the assassination of human rights activist and journalist GAURI LANKESH (29 January 1962 – 5 September 2017) are out on bail. Kapil Mishra, Anurag Thakur, Narsinghanand and many others who stoked violence… Read More Gauri Lankesh, Dr Umar Khalid… For the state, Umar Khalid & others are worse than heinous criminals
Raymond Geuss, Changing the Subject: Philosophy from Socrates to Adorno Reviewed by Frederick Neuhouser, Barnard College This volume belongs to the genre of works that aim to tell us something about what Western philosophy is — or, in this case perhaps, about what it was — by recounting its history from ancient Greece to today (which here means,… Read More Changing the Subject: Philosophy from Socrates to Adorno
Pjotr Sauer Donald Trump appeared to confuse geography and history on Monday, saying on television that he planned to meet Vladimir Putin “in Russia” on Friday for their much-anticipated, high-stakes summit. It was the latest in a series of verbal slip-ups by the US president – though had he made it a century and a half earlier, it… Read More Otter pelts, Orthodox priests and a $7.2m bargain: how Russia sold Alaska to the US
Dilip Simeon NB: This article was published seventeen year ago. I post it now because of a need to highlight certain alarming features of our criminal justice system. The article appeared in Mail Today on June 17, 2008, and is an account of my personal experience of Indian justice. The happenings it relates were public… Read More Insult to Injury
After the truth-shower 