When the State Always Doubts Your Identity; or disenfranchising India’s citizens

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

Dilip

Dadabhai Naoroji at 200: The Grand Old Man Who Exposed an Empire’s Loot

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

Dilip

Blindsided by Trump, Modi is learning hard lessons about India’s place in the new world order

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

Dilip

Gauri Lankesh, Dr Umar Khalid… For the state, Umar Khalid & others are worse than heinous criminals

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

Dilip

Changing the Subject: Philosophy from Socrates to Adorno

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

Dilip

Otter pelts, Orthodox priests and a $7.2m bargain: how Russia sold Alaska to the US

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

Erasing Palestine in the name of Jewish trauma: Jewish Voice for Labour (Nov 2024)

Seeing Things Clearly: How projecting past persecution onto Palestinians only perpetuates the war… We need to see what is really happening in all its precision… Only then can we see what specific political responses are necessary. Instead, a substitution occurs, Nazis are substituted for Hamas, the Holocaust for acts of political violence. Israelis, alongside many… Read More Erasing Palestine in the name of Jewish trauma: Jewish Voice for Labour (Nov 2024)

Dilip

The Documentary That Found Humanity by Interviewing 2,000 People

A very beautiful documentary on what makes us human. Human is a 2015 documentary by French environmentalist Yann Arthus-Bertrand. The film is almost entirely composed of exclusive aerial footage and first-person stories told into the camera. It was the first movie to premiere in the General Assembly Hall of the United Nations, to an audience of 1,000 viewers, including the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. Human… Read More The Documentary That Found Humanity by Interviewing 2,000 People

Dilip