First posted November 11, 2016 A few weeks ago, five people who were selling papers outside Hyde Park were arrested by the police for obstruction. When taken before the magistrates, they were all found guilty, four of them being bound over for six months and the other sentenced to forty shillings fine or a month’s… Read More George Orwell: Freedom of the Park (1945)
Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present, controls the past: George Orwell, Nineteen eighty-four DENNIS S. JESUDASAN In an interview with The Hindu , Kesavan Veluthat, the General President of the 81st session of the Indian History Congress which concluded in Chennai on Thursday, shares his views on the ICHR, and whether there… Read More ‘ICHR publishes only papers of those playing second fiddles’
Bharat Bhushan With the ascendance of Pushpa Kamal Dahal aka Prachanda as Prime Minister of Nepal and India’s bete noir K P Sharma Oli playing king-maker, the Indian establishment has come a cropper in the Himalayan nation. It was betting the house on a favourite, Sher Bahadur Deuba, whose party, the Nepali Congress although short of majority… Read More Why India was blindsided in Nepal government formation
The English novel at the end of the 19th century had a problem, and that problem was French. Emile Zola had thrown the first stone. In his 1875 manifesto, Le Roman Experimental, the prominent French novelist insisted that in order to survive the industrial age the novel would have to turn away from the charms of… Read More Why Turgenev Remains One of the Most Important Russian Writers
NB: Men and women of conscience, such as the author of this meditation on the dangerous course that his own country is taking; belong to what Israel itself names the righteous among the nations. They will no doubt be denounced as ‘anti-national’; but we need people like this all over the globe. Let us heed… Read More Israel’s political and constitutional crisis
[This article by Mahatma Gandhi was published towards the end of March 1930. It was part of a series of Gandhi’s articles and was a prelude to his arrest in the first week of May 1930] There is no halfway house between active loyalty and active disloyalty. There is much truth in the late Justice… Read More Duty of disloyalty. M. K. Gandhi (1930)
By Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn / CounterPunch All through the 1980s and 1990s, professorial mountebanks like James Q. Wilson and Charles Murray grew plump from best sellers about the criminal, probably innate, propensities of the “underclass,” about the pathology of poverty, the teen predators, the collapse of morals, the irresponsibility of teen moms. There… Read More Neoliberalism and Its Discontents
Jonathan Watts For anyone who cares about the Amazon rainforest, there will be an extra reason to celebrate the new year countdown in Brazil on 31 December because the first stroke of midnight will mark the last moment in power of Jair Bolsonaro. The defeat of the ultra-right former army captain, who unleashed a wave of… Read More Seven reasons to be cheerful about the Amazon in 2023 – and three to be terrified
Mrinal Pande Writers are incurable fabulists. But lying sleepless in the dark encourages one to mull over the inflexible image of Hindutva, which is today less of a religion and more of a war cry against all non-Hindus. As elections in crucial states draw close and electoral rallies become vast, frenzied affairs, Hindutva is placed… Read More What today’s peddlers of Hindutva don’t understand about Hinduism
Shobhit Mahajan; The Economic Times; December 17, 2022 At 1 am on December 5, scientists at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US achieved a major breakthrough. For the first time they managed to squeeze out more energy from a nuclear fusion reaction than was pumped into it. Ignition,… Read More For Fusion Jam Tomorrow
