Simon & Garfunkel – America “Let us be lovers, we’ll marry our fortunes togetherI’ve got some real estate here in my bag”So we bought a pack of cigarettes and Mrs. Wagner piesAnd walked off to look for America “Kathy”, I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh“Michigan seems like a dream to me now”It… Read More America
Prem Shankar Jha The following are excerpts from The Dismantling of India’s Democracy: 1947 to 2025 by Prem Shankar Jha; reproduced with permission from the publisher, Speaking Tiger. Over the decade since Narendra Modi has been the prime minister of India, at the head of a BJP government supported by a few local allies in the states… Read More Narendra Modi’s Step by Step Journey Towards Creating Fascism in India
Gideon Levy Pablo Picasso painted his famous picture in response to the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica on April 26, 1937. We now have a modern filmed version from Gaza. This report by Gideon Levy, in Haaretz, July 13, 2025 // The people of Guernica, which was bombed by fascists and Nazis during… Read More Gaza’s Guernica / Guernica stands in solidarity with Gaza (2024)
In the dream of the man that dreamed, the dreamed one awoke by Jorge Luis Borges NO ONE saw him disembark in the unanimous night, no one saw the bamboo canoe sinking into the sacred mud, but within a few days no one was unaware that the silent man came from the South and that… Read More THE CIRCULAR RUINS (1940)
July 11, 2025 – Sidharth Bhatia Source: The India Cable As tens of thousands continued their pilgrimage to the holy cave shrine of Amarnath and days ahead of Jammu and Kashmir’s Martyr’s Day, moderate Hurriyat chairman Mirwaiz Umar Farooq was stopped from delivering his weekly sermon at Srinagar’s Jamia Masjid and put under house arrest by authorities on Friday.… Read More Snapshot of the day: The Wire
While the BJP has defended the SIR publicly, there is anxiety within. Long-term voters of the party are upset at being asked to prove their citizenship. Bharat Bhushan The special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Bihar may turn out to be an ill-conceived and ill-timed exercise. It could also prove to be counterproductive for… Read More BJP could pay a heavy price for electoral roll revision in Bihar
This impeccably sourced account of the secretive agency during a period of global turmoil deserves a Pulitzer John Simpson In 1976 when we were both based in Brussels, my BBC mentor, the great Charles Wheeler, came back to the office from a grand US embassy party one evening and remarked: “The cleverest and most entertaining… Read More The Mission by Tim Weiner: Unmasking the CIA
There is a quiet crisis in higher education in India that runs deep, distinguished academician and former Chief Economic Advisor Deepak Nayyar said here on Wednesday (July 9, 2025), delivering the 2025 B.G. Deshmukh Lecture on ‘The Crisis of Higher Education in India: Disturbing Present and Worrisome Future’. Holding the Narendra Modi government responsible for… Read More There is a quiet and visible crisis in higher education in India that runs deep: Deepak Nayyar
The substitution of Large Language Models for genuine thinking is a generational threat. At stake is no less than the life of the mind. Aaron MacLean I have a warning for you. There is a conspiracy afoot in the land, targeting all of us. The computers in our pockets and the screens all around us… Read More A warning to the young: just say no to AI
Based on classified documents and first-person interviews, a startling history of the American war on Vietnamese civilians. Turse’s central aim in Kill Anything that Moves is to expose the unparalleled obscenity of the Vietnam War: unparalleled both in terms of the devastating scale and variety of harm done and the diabolical levels of premeditation on the part of the… Read More Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam
