Tag: censorship

Pondicherry Violence Sparks Question: Why Can’t India Interpret Hindu Gods?

More concerning is the university and police’s promptness to align with ABVP’s ideology, disregarding their obligation to operate within the framework of the Constitution of India. Instead of penalising those who commit violence, they punish the victims of violence… The list of such institutions is long where the administration has acted like the authorities of… Read More Pondicherry Violence Sparks Question: Why Can’t India Interpret Hindu Gods?

Dilip

Where Are the ‘Don Quixotes’ of Indian Academia?

NB: Anyone concerned about the intellectual health of their country should recall what Mao’s regime did to China’s academic life under the so-called Cultural Revolution in the late 1960’s. This was Mao Zedong’s motivated assault on academics, intellectuals and on his critics in the Communist Party leadership. Professor Frank Dikotter’s research study of this momentous… Read More Where Are the ‘Don Quixotes’ of Indian Academia?

Dilip

TikTok, tick-tock

Historians will find many reasons for the end of this American era, but the siege of TikTok reminds us that its largest cause was the epoch-defining rise of China… The US, that apostle of laissez-faire and free speech, now wants to save 170 million American TikTok users from themselves by banning an app. It’s hard to be… Read More TikTok, tick-tock

Dilip

China Nobel Laureate for literature becomes a target in nationalist slander campaign

Amy Hawkins  At first glance, a Nobel prize winning author, a bottle of green tea and Beijing’s Tsinghua University have little in common. But in recent weeks they have been dubbed by China’s nationalist netizens as the “three new evils” in the fight to defend the country’s valour in cyberspace. Last month a patriotic blogger… Read More China Nobel Laureate for literature becomes a target in nationalist slander campaign

Dilip

Sabry Hafez: the Novel, Politics and Islam – Haydar Haydar’s Banquet for Seaweed

First posted June 07, 2016 The astonishing story of the uproar in Egypt over the publication of a Syrian novel set in Algeria—a work of literature as trigger for political crisis and polemical turmoil, two decades after it was written, in a landscape completely transformed. Haydar Haydar’s fiction as tuning-fork of stark dissonances of time… Read More Sabry Hafez: the Novel, Politics and Islam – Haydar Haydar’s Banquet for Seaweed

Dilip

In a dark world, a light is held by those who make it harder for the powerful to lie

Journalists like Ravish Kumar battle hostile forces so that facts find a way to survive. With each new threat to our democracy, I cherish them all the more Zoe Williams In the summer, my friend Jess Search died after a short and vicious illness. She made documentaries, but people always eschewed words such as “producer” or “exec”… Read More In a dark world, a light is held by those who make it harder for the powerful to lie

Dilip

Alexei Navalny’s body given to mother by Russian authorities

Pjotr Sauer The body of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has been handed over to his mother nine days after he died in an Arctic prison, his spokesperson announced on Saturday. In a post on X, Kira Yarmysh thanked “all those who had demanded” the return of his body, but added that she did not know if… Read More Alexei Navalny’s body given to mother by Russian authorities

Dilip

Nakul Krishna on A. K. Ramanujan: The literary legacy of an Indian modernist / The essay censored by DU’s Academic Council

First posted August 15, 2013 “Yes, I know all that. I should be modern” – begins Ramanujan’s ‘Conventions of Despair’. Others in India have felt this impulse, and it has pulled them in different directions. In politics, it has drawn them towards nationalism, socialism and fascism. In religion, it has had similarly contradictory effects: either… Read More Nakul Krishna on A. K. Ramanujan: The literary legacy of an Indian modernist / The essay censored by DU’s Academic Council

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