Beyond remittances: A rare insight into the everyday lives of migrant workers Social anthropologist Shankar Ramaswami’s ‘Souls in the Kalyug’ is a rich, multi-layered text that provides a window into workers’ lives in India, including some hopeful strands within the destructive churnings of global capitalism. Sapan BookshelfSouls in the Kalyug: The Politics and Cosmologies of Migrant… Read More Book review: Souls in the Kalyug
SOURCE: Facebook This is an unbelievable piece of work by Sarthak and something that requires amplification Let me explain what he found, in simple terms. Sarthak is a Class 12 student from the 2025-26 batch, one of the 17 lakh students whose answer sheets went through CBSE’s new On-Screen Marking system. He spent days reading… Read More CBSE’s evaluation tenders, analysed by a student from the 2025-26 batch (FB)
The Tribune, 16 December, 2025 Chat GPT and Google Gemini are rapidly becoming the go-to places for students. That by itself is not surprising-after all generations of students have found ways to avoid rigor and skirt around academic engagement. Champion Guides (which condensed the whole course into a pocket-sized paperback) were followed by short YouTube… Read More Shobhit Mahajan: As AI replaces thinking, learning is eroding
Review by Patrick Malcolmson “In a time when tyranny is resurgent all over the globe, in a bewildering variety of forms – military and civilian, theocratic and kleptocratic, ideological and tribal – this book provides a synoptic historical and philosophic perspective that does full justice to the manifold phenomenon in all its range and complexity.”… Read More Tyrants: A History of Power, Injustice, and Terror
NB: An instructive essay on our current dispensation. I would sum up this regime’s method as a confusion of wisdom with cunning; its speech as unending sophistry (लफ़्फ़ाज़ी); and its goal as the eradication of simple human decency from public life. DS India’s current regime rests on three interwoven factors: Hindutva, a captured civil society,… Read More Suhas Palshikar: Anatomy of India’s New Regime
NB: The story of this remarkable man may also be read in Chapter 3, The Heart of the Heart, of Benjamin Labatut’s book When we Cease to understand the World; which is where I first read about hi. Alex Lebrun This is an English translation of a post written in French by my father Gérard Lebrun. The pages… Read More Alexander Grothendieck, the secret genius of mathematics
Let’s withdraw And meet the time as it seeks us: Shakespeare; Cymbeline Monju in Patparganj, Delhi, Winter 1995 Achintya Barua, known as Monju – or Manju – by his vast gathering of friends and accomplices passed away on May 17, 2026. Among the gang of dreamers from our college days six decades ago, he was… Read More Monju: spirit of the trees
The head of the Catholic Church is adding his moral suasion to a growing backlash against the impact of artificial intelligence By Margherita Stancati and Sam Schechner VATICAN CITY—Pope Leo XIV warned that artificial intelligence “threatens to normalize an anti-human vision” and said that the concentration of immense digital power in the hands of a few private actors… Read More Pope Leo Compares AI Threat to Biblical ‘Tower of Babel’
NB: A well written account of the ideas of a great thinker. However, when the author tells us that ‘Straussians are not necessarily but mostly Republicans‘, it jars, because in his own words, Strauss ‘did say that philosophy had been endangered by adopting a political agenda‘. The domain of the spirit cannot be reduced to… Read More The Legacy of Leo Strauss After 50 Years
Increasingly isolated president is determined to press on with Ukraine war, say well-placed sources, despite ailing economy Pjotr Sauer and Shaun Walker Vladimir Putin pulled up to a hotel in central Moscow earlier in May in a Russian-made SUV, dressed casually in jeans and a light jacket. Carrying a bouquet of flowers, he walked unhurriedly into the… Read More ‘There is profound disappointment in him’: mood in Russia turns against Putin / Russia hits Kyiv with hypersonic ballistic missile in ‘deranged’ attack
After the truth-shower 