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
A Post-Course Update from the fourth month of the Pagdandi Fellowship 2025-26 As the last of this year’s monsoon rains finally came to a halt and with the cold beginning to set in, we headed for the Narmada Valley, the final location of the Pagdandi Fellowship. We reached Jeevika Ashram in Indrana, a village on… Read More Nature, Culture & Economy in the Narmada Valley
For now, “anti-national” or “anti-Indian” books are merely being removed from syllabi. Slowly, they will disappear from libraries. Soon, they will cease to be mentioned at all. A long winter has begun to descend on the land of knowledge. Apoorvanand Knowledge – its very disciplines – are today locked in a struggle for survival on… Read More ‘Indianisation’ of Syllabi is Hollowing Out Knowledge in Our Universities
The kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and his wife solidifies America’s role as a gangster state. Violence does not generate peace. It generates violence. The immolation of international and humanitarian law, as the U.S. and Israel have done in Gaza, and as took place in Caracas, generates a world without laws, a world of… Read More ‘Naked imperialism’: how Trump intervention in Venezuela is a return to form for the US
Ending the American Dream by 2029? For writers, the future has long been a tricky terrain. While the past can prove unsettling and the present uncomfortable, the future seems to free the mind from reality’s restraints and let the imagination soar. Yet it has also proven full of political pitfalls. The ‘Putinization’ of US foreign… Read More Alfred McCoy: The Future According to Trump / Julian Borger: The Putinization of US foreign policy has arrived in Venezuela
NB: This notice has been placed here at the request of one of the guest editors. DS Special Issue of the British Journal of Aesthetics on “Transnational Feminist Aesthetics” Firm deadline for submissions: 15th June 2026Please adhere to the deadline as we are on a strict production schedule. Guest Editors: Peg Brand Weiser (Indiana University, Emerita) Sukhvinder Shahi (University of Arizona) Ritwik Agrawal (University of Arizona) This special issue… Read More Call for Papers: Special Issue of the British Journal of Aesthetics
NB: In India today, a section of opinion considers any criticism of Israel to be equivalent to ‘anti-nationalism’. This is similar to what has taken place in the USA; where even academic rersearch on Palestinan history is censored. It’s ridiculous that criticism of another country should be seen as betrayal of my country. Why? What… Read More They Questioned India–Israel Ties. Now the trolls want to destroy their lives
Memory produces hope in the same way that amnesia produces despair,” the theologian Walter Brueggemann noted. It is an extraordinary statement, one that reminds us that though hope is about the future, grounds for hope lie in the records and recollections of the past. We can tell of a past that was nothing but defeats, cruelties and… Read More ‘Hope is an embrace of the unknown’: Rebecca Solnit on living in dark times (2016)
NB: A timely reminder that a century ago the two outstanding revolutionaries of the world were Gandhi and Lenin; and that Indian intellectuals were profoundly affected by their ideas. To carry this discussion further, the essays immediately following this article argue that the most significant contra-position in the world in the past century – in… Read More Polar perspectives: Gandhi vs Lenin
After the truth-shower 