The Three Questions, by Leo Tolstoy It once occurred to a certain king that if he always knew the right time to begin everything; if he knew who were the right people to listen to, and whom to avoid; and, above all, if he always knew what was the most important thing to do, he would… Read More Leo Tolstoy: The Three Questions (1885) / Lu Xun: Waiting for a Genius (1924)
The past few weeks have highlighted more clearly than ever, that the authority and the rule of law within South Africa’s constitutional parliamentary dispensation has gone beyond merely fraying at the edges. Also how confusion can be spread, with potentially dangerous consequences, by the manipulation of news. This manipulation becomes possible because there are too… Read More Terry Bell: South Africa is teetering on the brink of an abyss
Beijing (AsiaNews) – The popular Chinese messaging site WeChat continues to silence He Weifang, a Peking University academic known for his campaigns in favour of the establishment of the rule of law and freedom of expression in China. In a handwritten letter that has been circulating on the web since 3 February, the academic denounced… Read More WeChat silences He Weifang, defender of rule of law in China.
Speech delivered by Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, (1818-1883) on January 10, I860, at a public reading for the benefit of the Society for the Aid of Indigent Writers and Scientists: The first edition of Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet and the first part of Cervantes’ novel Don Quixote appeared in the same year, at the very beginning of the seventeenth… Read More Ivan Turgenev on Hamlet and Don Quixote / The madness in Hamlet and Don Quixote
Algerian Chronicles by Albert CamusReviewed by George Scialabba The problem of revolutionary violence was perhaps the most fateful question of political morality in the twentieth century. Two texts are indispensable to anyone wanting to engage that question: Camus’s “Neither Victims nor Executioners” (1946) and Sartre’s introduction to The Wretched of the Earth (1961), written one… Read More Book review: Resistance, Rebellion & Writing. Albert Camus’s dispatches on the Algerian crisis
Dear friends, comrades,“Never again!” the call of the Hibakusha or Japanese A-bomb survivors reverberates across the decades, reminding us of the need to keep working for peace in a region with two nuclear-armed countries. This award-winning film by Karachi-based filmmaker and Sapan founding member Aisha Gazdar captures the tragedy and the resolve to “never forget” the bombing… Read More Never Again!
from Himal, October 2011 The Mind of Brahma Dilip Simeon In 2009 I undertook what was to be the most memorable journey of my life. I have made other journeys as momentous in their implications, but I would have to think of a reason. The trip to Tibet by air, road and foot was unmistakably different.… Read More The Mind of Brahma
n July 14, 2022, Sri Lanka’s parliamentary speaker announced that he had accepted the resignation of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, sent by email from Singapore where he had fled via The Maldives. That this former military commander—known as “the terminator” due to his propensity to get critics assassinated—was forced to resign by an overwhelmingly nonviolent mass movement marks this… Read More Rohini Hensman: Sri Lanka’s democratic revolution. The latest episode in a decades-long drama
First posted August 06, 2013 This paper was researched and written by Rashmi Singh as part of AMAN’s ongoing research on informal labourers. The paper was presented at the Ninth International Conference of the Association for Indian Labour Historians in Delhi. In 2007, following the brutal rape and murder of a fourteen year old school… Read More Rashmi Singh: Migrant Workers in the Kashmir Valley
In the depths of winter I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer – Albert Camus; The Stranger Heroism isn’t much… happiness is more difficult – Letters to a German friend Before the terrifying prospects now available to humanity, we see even more clearly that peace is the only goal worth struggling… Read More Invincible Summer – Albert Camus
After the truth-shower 