Bharat Bhushan Even as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) talks up its promise of “Viksit Bharat” (Developed India), it increasingly looks like a party of turncoats. The BJP has tended to drop 20 to 30 per cent of sitting legislators in every election to counter anti-incumbency. But why is it filling these vacancies with defectors from the… Read More The BJP and political turncoats
Letter to the Readers, Mainstream, April 6, 2024 BOOKS: IMAGE & SOUND: Editor’s Picks
An unprecedented leap of 38.5C in the coldest place on Earth is a harbinger of a disaster for humans and the local ecosystem On 18 March, 2022, scientists at the Concordia research station on the east Antarctic plateau documented a remarkable event. They recorded the largest jump in temperature ever measured at a meteorological centre on Earth.… Read More ‘Simply mind-boggling’: record temperature jump in Antarctic raises fears of catastrophe
* (Coverpage Artwork Credits: Yuri Annenkov – Portrait of Boris Pasternak (1921)) Letter to the Readers, Mainstream, March 30, 2024 BOOKS: IMAGE & SOUND: Editor’s Picks:
By shutting the door to any peaceful resolution and leaving no other option for Palestinians, Israel created its own nemesis in Hamas. GAZA casualties live statistics Hamas, like all resistance groups, from the African National Congress to The Irish Republic Army, are as demonized as they are misunderstood. Hamas is a religious, nationalist political movement.… Read More The Chris Hedges Report: Hamas: How Israel Created Its Own Nemesis
To be radical requires a theory of how this world, for all its problems, contains and is fostering the beginning of another, very different world. Jedediah Britton-Purdy All sorts of people had come to the Welsh countryside to spend the day talking about the history of labor radicalism: miners, organizers, researchers, politicians. But the star… Read More Raymond Williams’s Resources for Hope
NB: Observation by a psychoanalyst: The writer seems to know little about psychotherapy: what the latter does is validate the feelings of trauma, and provide empathy and support. How the person copes is best left to themselves and to whatever strategies, personal and collective they can creatively access or create. We all live through adolescence… Read More ‘We are all unwell’: a scholar’s radical approach to health
NB: Anyone concerned about the intellectual health of their country should recall what Mao’s regime did to China’s academic life under the so-called Cultural Revolution in the late 1960’s. This was Mao Zedong’s motivated assault on academics, intellectuals and on his critics in the Communist Party leadership. Professor Frank Dikotter’s research study of this momentous… Read More Where Are the ‘Don Quixotes’ of Indian Academia?
We look for loneliness inside our heads when its source lies all around us, in the destruction of collective life, the erosion of communal bonds, the ruin of civil society, the squeezing of public spaces. Kenan Malik ‘The hope that political action will gradually humanise industrial society has given way to a determination to survive… Read More We think loneliness is in our heads, but its source lies in the ruin of civil society
Premiered on 10 Nov 2022 In anticipation of the opening of our upcoming exhibition, (De)constructing Ideology: The Cultural Revolution and Beyond, Frank Dikötter will present a brief history of the Cultural Revolution. Dr. Dikötter, Chair Professor at the University of Hong Kong and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, is the author of People’s Trilogy,… Read More The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History with Frank Dikötter
After the truth-shower 