Aslı Bâli and Samuel Moyn America is in decline. And so is Pax America: the American-led world order. While there are many genuine dangers of American decline, there has never been a better chance to say clearly how much the unipolar order always left to be desired, and to imagine a multipolar world that might secure… Read More What should replace the American-led world order?
Socrates: If the whole is ailing the part cannot be well / Kautilya: Disaffection among Subjects Kautilya’s observations on the causes of discontent in a polity New Delhi: Most weekend memorial lectures by sitting judges pass with little public attention. Not those delivered by Supreme Court Justice Ujjal Bhuyan, who has often used such platforms to candidly critique the… Read More In SC judge Ujjal Bhuyan’s candour beyond the courtroom, some questions for the judiciary
Edward Luce “Tweets don’t overturn signed agreements,” said a Saudi official last week. Amid America’s broiling ocean of surrealism, being instructed by a dynastic autocracy on the sanctity of the contract stands out. Donald Trump had claimed to amend a US-Saudi nuclear deal on his Truth Social site the day after it was signed. That… Read More Trump’s waning sway over the world
Watch: The reason why the RSS wants to maintain an iron grip over Indian education: इंडियन एक्सप्रेस ने छापा प्रधान के इस्तीफे की हकीकत RSS क्यों रखना चाहता शिक्षा मंत्रालय अपने अधीन? Kautilya’s observations on the causes of discontent in a polity NB: From a Facebook post by Anikendranath Sen, journalist Gogia Pasha, or his ilk,… Read More A Note of Caution for India’s Gen Z movement: The BJP/RSS scheme for a permanent take-over
Once you learn what the “uni-context” is, you won’t stop seeing it everywhere Derek Thompson Here are some questions that I consider self-evidently compelling about the modern world: Why is the news media so interested in telling you how much the world sucks all the time? Why are so many of us obsessed with distraction… Read More A Philosopher’s One-Word Theory to Explain Why the World Feels So Weird
The Cockroach Janta Party won this battle partly because the legions it led seemed armoured with an alloy of innocence and insouciance. This had something to do with how young they were Mukul Kesavan It was the 6th of June. Abhijeet Dipke had set out his stall at Jantar Mantar after returning from Boston. I… Read More Dawn for democracy
NB: Listen to Arvind Anjum’s interviews with the new arrivals at the protest site. Pakistani youth express their admiration and solidarity with struggling Indian students: BBC report. DS The protest has convincingly established not just the irrelevance of legacy TV channels but also their continued abandonment of basic journalistic norms Kalpana Sharma There were broken… Read More The media missed the biggest story: How a generation fed on consumerism and hate found its voice
Fear evaporates as India’s youth confront State power on streets. There were 152 paper leaks in the last 10 years with zero convictions Bharat Bhushan Pan India protests against the events of July 20 have marked a significant shift in Indian politics, moribund for 12 years under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. What began as a narrow protest about examination… Read More Bharat Bhushan: Exam anger becomes a political reckoning
How the RSS is infiltrating India’s intellectual spaces NB: The Caravan article below indicates why the Modi government was so reluctant to dismiss the Education Minister. News Flash: Pradhan submitted his resignation a few hours ago. Read his statement here. It took over a month of agitation by millions of students and also overseas Indians… Read More The Takeover (2019)
Separating truth from fiction in the most successful African movie of all time Carey Baraka 1. To talk about The Gods Must Be Crazy, we have to start with the VHS tapes. We didn’t have many of them when I was growing up in Kisumu, a port city in western Kenya on the banks of Lake… Read More The Gods Are Still Crazy
After the truth-shower 