NB: This is a simple and brilliant interview given by Camus nearly seven decades ago but with many lessons for us today, wherever we may live. It is time to think of human life in generational terms, rather than of divisive identities and factional politics. DS Published in Albert Camus, Resistance Rebellion & Death (1960)… Read More Albert Camus: The Wager of Our Generation
Nuno P. Monteiro and Fritz Bartel, eds., Before and after the fall: world politics and the end of the Cold War, Cambridge, 2021 Reviewed by Lorenzo Cladi In this volume, Nuno Monteiro and Fritz Bartel bring together a vast array of scholars. They all get to grips with the issue of continuity and change with… Read More Before and after the fall: World politics & the end of the Cold War
NB: In other words, the BJP/RSS government is now selecting the electorate. As Bertold Brecht wrote in his poem The Solution, (1953) on the East German government’s despotic ways: Perhaps the government ought to dissolve the people and elect another? DS Exercises like the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls presage a state of affairs… Read More When the State Always Doubts Your Identity; or disenfranchising India’s citizens
++++++Readers outside of India can donate here to support Mainstream Weeklyhttps://tinyurl.com/2rsy4ss6++++++ In this Issue: BOOKS IMAGE & SOUND Editor’s Picks: Books of Note: Source: MAINSTREAM
New Delhi spent decades cosying up to the US. The truth is, Washington doesn’t have allies outside the west – it has clients. What changed was that over the past quarter of a century, India’s political class began to see the US as the country’s natural partner. It was the main destination of India’s exports… Read More Blindsided by Trump, Modi is learning hard lessons about India’s place in the new world order
NB: Judicial conscience requires human backbone DS For the state, Umar Khalid and others are worse than heinous criminals All those charged with the assassination of human rights activist and journalist GAURI LANKESH (29 January 1962 – 5 September 2017) are out on bail. Kapil Mishra, Anurag Thakur, Narsinghanand and many others who stoked violence… Read More Gauri Lankesh, Dr Umar Khalid… For the state, Umar Khalid & others are worse than heinous criminals
Raymond Geuss, Changing the Subject: Philosophy from Socrates to Adorno Reviewed by Frederick Neuhouser, Barnard College This volume belongs to the genre of works that aim to tell us something about what Western philosophy is — or, in this case perhaps, about what it was — by recounting its history from ancient Greece to today (which here means,… Read More Changing the Subject: Philosophy from Socrates to Adorno
Dilip Simeon NB: This article was published seventeen year ago. I post it now because of a need to highlight certain alarming features of our criminal justice system. The article appeared in Mail Today on June 17, 2008, and is an account of my personal experience of Indian justice. The happenings it relates were public… Read More Insult to Injury
Bharat Bhushan With its dream of reaching greatness by hanging on to the coattails of the United States going bust, India needs to radically rethink its foreign policy. Rather than the ongoing tentative recalibration, it needs to be redesigned from the ground up. Although Indian political leaders value loyalty to a fault, this cannot be… Read More India’s Foreign Policy Is In Need Of Fresh Stewardship Columnists
We’re Right Again. Now that it is too late, it’s no longer forbidden to use the word “genocide” in polite company. Now, as Gazans starve, as they are shot by soldiers from the Israel Defense Forces while seeking food aid at sites run by the farcically-named Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the world has decided it is, after all, “against this.” Only recently,… Read More For Once in Our Lives
After the truth-shower 