Reviewed by Patrick Keane To begin with full disclosure: I am in essential agreement with the now famous or infamous salvo Mark Lilla fired off shortly after the publication of the book here under review. I refer of course to his widely discussed and hotly debated op-ed, “The End of Identity Liberalism,” which appeared in… Read More Book review. The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction, by Mark Lilla
The story of the Kurukshetra war echoes the horrors of Partition in the play. In Dharamvir Bharati’s pathbreaking Hindi play, Andha Yug (1953), the story of the Kurukshetra war echoes the horrors of Partition, both encapsulated in the cry, “What is this peace you have given us, god”. Andha Yug achieved iconic status: Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru watched a production… Read More Andha Yug by Dharamvir Bharati (1953): Theatre of Roots
NB: This was the first review of my novel, Revolution Highway, published in 2010. It also reviews Hari Kunzru’s My Revolutions (2007); and was written by Anjum Hasan. It appeared in Caravan in January 2011. More reviews are available here. My thanks and best regards to Anjum and all the other reviewers. DS Dilip Simeon,… Read More You Say You Want a Revolution
Mukul Kesavan on Salman Rushdie and the violence on free thought NB: In case we forget what’s happened in India between 2013 and 2017: Four Indian intellectuals who were murdered for their ideas (2013-2017) In the decades since Khomeini’s fatwa overset Salman Rushdie’s life, his critics have sometimes suggested that he isn’t really a free speech icon because… Read More Bloodied pen
Slavoj Zizek is a Slovenian graphomaniac who infuriates some of the world’s most annoying people, and might for this reason alone be cherished. He once enjoyed a high degree of pop-philosophical notoriety, being blamed by pundits who had clearly never read his books for the scourge of pomo relativism that threatened to undermine the ‘moral… Read More Slavoj Zizek: the philosopher who annoys all the right people
NB: Iran’s vicious theocracy has never withdrawn the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. The practice of placing monetary rewards on persons heads, i.e., offering money for death, is repulsive and barbaric, no matter who does it. Contract killings are murder, and to for so-called believers to claim this is done for Almighty God is despicable. God… Read More Salman Rushdie has again instructed us in a profound lesson: great literature will always be a matter of life and death
I read a lot of biographies, these often set in other countries than my own. A book I have just finished is Benedetto Croce and Italian Fascism, by the Canadian scholar, Fabio Fernando Rizi. It uses the life of a great philosopher to tell a larger story of the times he passed through. Reading Rizi’s book,… Read More Ramachandra Guha: Reading about Mussolini’s Italy in Modi’s India
I thought about the terrible uselessness of suffering. Love leaves behind its creation-the next generation coming into the world; the continuation of humanity. But suffering? Such a great part of human experience, the most difficult and painful, passes leaving no trace. If one were to collect the energy of suffering emitted by the millions of… Read More Book review: Imperium by Ryszard Kapuściński (1993)
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)
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
