The two-state two-step wasn’t a serious commitment; it was a way of pretending that the shrinking bantustans of Gaza and the West Bank were a state in the making Mukul Kesavan Over the last month, global opinion on Israel’s unending massacre of Palestinians in Gaza has shifted, at least rhetorically. Emmanuel Macron, Keir Starmer and… Read More Visual testament
Siut Wai Hung Clarence Manicheanism: An Overview A map of the spread of Manichaeism (300–500). World History Atlas, Dorling Kindersly. At first glance, the sculpture residing in the Cao’an temple in Jinjiang of the Fujian province seems to be just another statue of Buddha. The stone inscription outside the shrine calls the figure Moniguangfo, or Mani, the… Read More The Forgotten Buddha: Manichaeism and Buddhist Elements in Imperial China
Clearly, India’s ‘strong leader’ is caught between his aspiration to emerge as national war hero and thus sweep the polls with a two-thirds majority on the one hand and be a trusted Trump buddy on the other. P. Raman The Wire had in these columns narrated how Narendra Modi had often lampooned his predecessor as ‘Maunmohan’ Singh… Read More How the Sudden Ceasefire Marred the Prime Minister’s PR Script
Disinformation spread to mainstream channels in what experts call deliberate ‘informational warfare’ Hannah Ellis-Petersen South Asia correspondent As missiles and drones crisscrossed the night skies above India and Pakistan earlier this month, another invisible war was taking place. Not long after the Indian government announced Operation Sindoor, the military offensive against Pakistan triggered by a militant attack in Kashmir that… Read More How social media lies fuelled a rush to war between India and Pakistan
Palestinians and activists forced out of the village of Mughayyir al-Deir say they were harassed, stoned and shot at Lorenzo Tondo, Quique Kierszenbaum and Sufian Taha in Jerusalem Survivors of an attack by violent Israeli settlers have described being “hunted” across a West Bank valley by men armed with pistols, rifles and batons, who beat them so badly that all 10… Read More Chased, beaten and robbed: survivors describe Israeli settler violence in West Bank / Chris Hedges on The End of the Western Mythology
Our democratic and secular fabric has frayed, our economic progress has stalled. The gap between China and India is now so large that the phrase, ‘Chindia’, has dropped out of circulation Ramachandra Guha India and Pakistan were born at the same time, cut from the cloth of the same Empire. They inherited a common political,… Read More A wake-up call
When fossilised remains were discovered in the Djurab desert in 2001, they were hailed as radically rewriting the history of our species. But not everyone was convinced – and the bitter argument that followed has consumed the lives of scholars ever since By Scott Sayare On a late-summer day in 2001, at the University of… Read More The curse of Toumaï: an ancient skull, a disputed femur and a bitter feud over humanity’s origins
The proceedings of the highest court sounded more like the chatter of uncles or an exchange between a headmaster and parents on whether a boy was well-behaved. It was understood that national interest trumps all rights, that a nation at war brooks no dissent, not even a nuanced articulation of the country’s stand… Positing nationalism… Read More The nationalism we forgot
From a media prize with a dubious pedigree to the horrors of Gaza, the establishment forgets and remembers what suits it best Hanno Hauenstein Growing up in Germany, we were taught to believe we had done better. Better than our grandparents’ generation, who swept their complicity under a thick rug of silence. Better even than… Read More Germany trumpets its reckoning with its Nazi past – except when it’s inconvenient
How could I write songs of hatred when I felt no hate? And, between ourselves, I never hated the French, although I thanked God when we were rid of them. How could I, to whom the only significant things are civilization and barbarism, hate a nation which is among the most cultivated in the world,… Read More The Great Unread: Goethe’s Faustian life
After the truth-shower 