Ivan Turgenev on Hamlet and Don Quixote / The madness in Hamlet and Don Quixote

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

Dilip

Book review: Resistance, Rebellion & Writing. Albert Camus’s dispatches on the Algerian crisis

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

Dilip

Never Again!

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!

Dilip

The Mind of Brahma

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

Dilip

Rohini Hensman: Sri Lanka’s democratic revolution. The latest episode in a decades-long drama

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

Dilip

Hindi Writers Slam Police Complaint Against Author Geetanjali Shree / For the first time ever, a book in an Indian language has won the Booker Prize

NB: The game is quite easy to understand, really. The Sangh Parivar and its allies wish to set themselves up as sole representative of Hindu ‘sentiment’; and the sole interpreter of what Hinduism is. They dream of becoming the Head Quarters of Religious Truth for the Indian people. It is a replica of the harassment of… Read More Hindi Writers Slam Police Complaint Against Author Geetanjali Shree / For the first time ever, a book in an Indian language has won the Booker Prize

Dilip

Gautam Bhatia on The Executive(’s) Court: Notes on the Legacy of Justice A.M. Khanwilkar

NB: To this excellent commentary on justice I will add a few lines from J.P. Stern’s book, Hitler: The Fuhrer and the People (1992). They are taken from pages 113-114; a chapter called The Spirit of National Socialist Law: “National Socialist law is not, as in Dickens, ‘an ass’: that is, extravagant, purblind, and pompously remote from the… Read More Gautam Bhatia on The Executive(’s) Court: Notes on the Legacy of Justice A.M. Khanwilkar

Dilip

Socrates: If the whole is ailing the part cannot be well / Kautilya: Disaffection among Subjects / Darkness at noon, felled by the judiciary

The Sophists taught, rather publicly, that the summit of happiness is to combine the appearance of justice with actual injustice: G. A. McBrayer; On the origin of the Idea of Natural Right; in Brill’s Companion to Leo Strauss, 2005; p 44 Actor Ashutosh Rana की आवाज में Poet Aalok Shrivastav की ये Hindi Ghazal “that… Read More Socrates: If the whole is ailing the part cannot be well / Kautilya: Disaffection among Subjects / Darkness at noon, felled by the judiciary

Dilip