NB: A blurb for a book of philosophical essays asks if ours is the era of ‘faint-hearted’ philosophy, because we were/are not ‘able to bear the greatness, the immensity of the claims made by the human spirit.’ The ongoing ideological assault on the mind and the very soul of humanity point to the widespread failures… Read More Natalia Ginzburg: Our Monstrous Ideas
NB: Those who bang on about Macaulay’s Minute on education (1835) should acquaint themselves with this early Indian patriot, whose work in education inspired a generation and who preceded Macaulay by many years. DS The men of Young Bengal emerge not as pale imitations of British liberals, but as creative political thinkers who addressed India’s… Read More ‘India’s First Radicals’ argues for a generous assessment of 19th-century Indian intellectual life
Shobhit Mahajan The Tribune, 16 December, 2025 Chat GPT and Google Gemini are rapidly becoming the go-to places for students. That by itself is not surprising-after all generations of students have found ways to avoid rigor and skirt around academic engagement. Champion Guides (which condensed the whole course into a pocket-sized paperback) were followed by… Read More As AI replaces thinking, learning is eroding
This article was authored in June 2024. It appears in our fifth print issue, Contra Temps, available here Buber had written that for “political Zionism,” “the State is the goal and Zion a ‘myth’ that inflames the masses.” That propaganda employed to shore up nationalist militarism and settler-colonialism could leverage European guilt to “distort and exploit respectable… Read More Zionism Breaks
NB: This article is interesting but open to caveats. One does not have to be a Putinist or Russian chauvinist to object to the statement that Russia started World War II by signing the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in August 1939 (see below); simply aware of historical facts. Were Britain and France responsible for WW2 becuase they… Read More Investigating Putinism: History Over Ideology
In post-May Paris, a mysterious Maoist activist, Fernando, brings about a dozen of people to form a revolutionary group. Studying this charismatic-led organization allows Julie Pagis to deepen our understanding of Weberian domination through sociological enlightenments by David Copello , 25 November What became of the activists of May ’68? The question of the long-term… Read More A Maoist Enigma in Post-May France
NB: Accepting an award in the name of a prime suspect in the Mahatma Gandhi murder case is but a logical step forward from playing to-ey to-ey with brazen Savarkarites and Godse-ites. Not all patriots are scoundrels; but all scoundrels are definitely patriots. Wit is no substitute for wisdom, Shashi. Your performance is becoming cringeworthy.… Read More Refusing Savarkar award exposes Shashi Tharoor’s dilemma
Dr Rebecca Reich examines politics, culture and reality in the Soviet Union “Dissenters in the USSR responded by making literary use of psychiatric discourse to both validate themselves and challenge the authority of the state. “The impact of their essays, transcripts, poems and works of fiction may have seemed limited within the isolation and silence… Read More State of Madness: Psychiatry, Literature, and Dissent After Stalin
NB: The Indian Army has always been the most visibly secular part of the Indian establishment; commanding maximum trust among the public in times of communal unrest. It is a tragic and extremely dangerous move on the part of the ruling party to try and influence the Armed Forces with their political ideology. It is… Read More The Indian Army’s Visible Adherence to the Majority Religion Can No Longer Be Ignored
Satya Sagar The recent surrender of top leadership figures within the Communist Party of India (Maoist) marks the most decisive failure yet in their decades-long armed struggle against the Indian state. This collapse signals the strategic end of a movement that consciously sought to replicate the great revolutionary success of Mao’s China on the complex,… Read More The Red Sunset: Analysing the Decline of the CPI (Maoist)
After the truth-shower 