Tiruppur in Tamil Nadu and Surat in Gujarat are the preeminent textile clusters in India. In Surat there are two million workers in fifty thousand textile manufacturing units. Surat is a hub for synthetic fibres, especially sarees. At ease conversations on 27 and 28 December 2023 with a printing & dyeing factory worker in an… Read More Conversations with a textile worker in Surat / सूरत में एक कपड़ा मजदूर से बातचीत
क्या हुआ जब राम स्वप्न में आए? कुलदीप कुमार रात सपने में रामजी ने दर्शन दिए. मैं डायरी में कुछ लिखने का कठिन प्रयास कर रहा था. एक हाथ में कलम थी और दूसरे में मैग्नीफाइंग ग्लास. अचानक लगा कि कमरा किसी दिव्य सुगंध से भर उठा है. सिर उठाया तो देखा कि रामचंद्र जी… Read More तुलसी ने लिखा था ‘संत हृदय नवनीत समाना’, आज होते तो ‘संत हृदय बुलडोज़र समाना’ लिखना पड़ता
The Babri Masjid ruling inaugurated a pattern where the Court berated the government or its favoured party, which still ended up on the winning side. Girish Shahane “The attempt to abrogate Article 370 is likely to meet its end in the Supreme Court”. That’s a line from a column I wrote after the Indian government radically changed… Read More Punishing victims, rewarding perpetrators: The Supreme Court’s creative contortions
The homogenic national society is the most artificial society to have ever been created and is the result of the “social engineering project… Due to its bureaucratic nature, Statism needs the homogenisation of space and time to function. It requires that within its borders, cultures and ways of life are melted into one singular artificial… Read More Against homogenisation: Advancing diversity through Democratic Confederalism
How “anti-terror” laws used to silence meaningful dissent and solidarity with oppressed peoples. ~ Arîn Qereçox In January 2019, I travelled to Syria to learn about the revolution unfolding in the country’s north since 2012. At the time, we called it the Rojava Revolution, as the land being held by revolutionary forces was roughly the… Read More Kurdish solidarity crackdown
The Western tendency to reduce mass-scale crime to an omnipotent leader has always been a misleading one. Even Stalinism was not the work of one man, but of the security services and individuals willing to denounce their fellow neighbors for housing rights or petty grievances, as the Kyiv-born Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov so mercilessly satires in… Read More What the West gets wrong on Stalin and Putin
Mrinal Pande A cluster of photos printed in a major English daily, the day after the week long rituals began in Ayodhya’s new Ram temple, confirms that our ‘Beti Padhao‘ and ‘Stree Sashkteekaran’ and various ‘Matru Kalyan Yojanas’ notwithstanding, the traditional gendered hierarchies remain firmly in place both on the streets and in the temple in Ayodhya. In… Read More What Happens in Ayodhya Doesn’t Stay in Ayodhya
By JACKSON DIIANI Question: Who owns the parking meters in Chicago? Answer: Morgan Stanley and the city of Abu Dhabi. In 2008, in order to offset a budget crisis, the city council leased the parking meter system to a company called Chicago Parking Meters LLC, owned by Morgan Stanley and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. Rates in most… Read More Is America like the Soviet Union in 1990?
NB: D. D. Kosambi (1907-1966) was one of India’s most accomplished intellectuals. Hailing from Goa, he was a polyglot familiar with Konkani, Marathi, Hindi, Sanskrit, Pali, English, French, Italian and German (I may have missed some languages). He was a mathematician, statistician, geneticist, philologist, physicist, numismatist, archaeologist, historian and public intellectual (find a biography here). He… Read More ‘Baba’ – A Personal Tribute to Damodar Dharmanand Kosambi, by A. L. Basham
Murtaza Hussain ISRAEL’S UNRELENTING ASSAULT on the Gaza Strip is beginning to tip the Middle East into a wider regional conflict. In the past week, the Houthis in Yemen emerged as an unlikely power player, successfully disrupting global shipping in the name of Palestinians in Gaza and goading the U.S. into launching a series of airstrikes… Read More The Houthis may have checkmated Biden in Red Sea standoff
After the truth-shower 