Abinash Dash Choudhury Cuttack first came to me as a palimpsest of stories in which the personal, the historical, and the mythological mingled without clear distinction. From my father, I learnt that it was the city where my paternal grandfather spent his final days in penury, shuttling between his workplace in the Old Secretariat and… Read More Seeing Cuttack
The Colombian novelist on Trump’s new doctrine and the long shadow of US aggression in Latin America Intervention and imperialism: that’s what the new world looks like. It will take many shapes. One of them is what we saw in Venezuela, but other processes are at work. I’ve been worried for a long time about… Read More ‘An International Thug’
The image Narendra Modi sought as a world leader who is principled and autonomous has been broken. Indian diplomats rely on lobbying firm not once, but routinely for access. Records show a pattern of dependency on the lobbying firm even for routine telephone calls and meetings — paying upfront for access — rather than through… Read More Muted on Venezuela, patronised by Trump, dependent on lobbyists: Modi’s global image takes a hit
The president has vowed to kill off ‘woke’ in his second term in office, and the venerable cultural institution a few blocks from the White House is in his sights By Charlotte Higgins On 30 May last year, Kim Sajet was working in her office in the grandly porticoed National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC. The gallery… Read More Trump’s assault on the Smithsonian: ‘The goal is to reframe the entire culture of the US’
Once humiliation is naturalised as a civilisational condition, violence no longer appears as aggression but as rectification. Anubhav Singh Cinema has never merely reflected political life; it has functioned as one of its most efficient laboratories. From its earliest mass forms, cinema has been a technology for organising affect, disciplining perception, and training populations to… Read More How Hindi Cinema is Preparing India for Violence
Carlos Padrón Venezuelan psychoanalyst As Venezuelans, we share embodied knowledge formed by living through violence, terror, collapse, authoritarianism, migration, fear, absurdity, trauma, and survival. But we also share a layered archive of extraordinary stories: the struggles and resilience of our people; our complex and fascinating history; our literature, art, and music; our relentless and often… Read More Venezuela: Private Wounds, Loud Audiences
NB: Justice in India today: no trial, no conviction, no bail; jail for 5 years. Sometimes we are punished not for what we did but for who we are. DS The young scholar’s work, though not without its flaws, is one of one of the most accomplished doctoral dissertations by an Indian that I have… Read More Ramachandra Guha: In praise of Dr Umar Khalid, from one historian to another
The US president has been quite clear that Cuba, Mexico, Colombia and Greenland are in his sights. We must believe him… When the Soviet Union collapsed, US elites convinced themselves they were militarily invincible and that their economic model marked the endpoint of human development. That hubris led directly to catastrophe in Iraq, Afghanistan and… Read More Trump’s new world order is being born – and Venezuela is just the start
The United States is a republic forged by war; its founding document lists grievances against a king for quartering troops and waging war without consent. Yet modern Americans often cheer the latest intervention with little reflection on history or morality. The Maduro raid reveals a people quick to salute and slow to question. When the… Read More The Ugly Truth About Many Americans: They Love War
Opinion by Anne Applebaum In George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, the world is divided into three spheres of influence: Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia, all perpetually at war. Sometimes two of the states form an alliance against the third. Sometimes they abruptly switch sides. No reasons are given. Instead, the Party tells the proles, “We have always been at… Read More Trump’s ‘American dominance’ may leave the USA with nothing
After the truth-shower 