Interview with the author November 11, 2025 There is a whole agenda out there waiting for a younger generation of the left to lay out in a rigorous and comprehensive way. But that is an agenda that will simply collapse if it subscribes to “orthodoxies” and other forms of intellectual snobbery. Historical materialism as Marx… Read More Jairus Banaji on his book A Marxist Mosaic
Protestors near Dhaka’s famous Shahbagh intersection has called for the formation of a “revolutionary government”. Bharat Bhushan The political situation in Bangladesh is increasingly unpredictable as some are using the violence following the assassination of youth leader Sharif Osman Hadi as an argument to stall the general election due in February 2026. Protestors near Dhaka’s famous Shahbagh… Read More Bangladesh Unravels, Even as Indian Diplomacy Continues to Falter
BJP governments are incapable of a Beijing-style clean-up. The government would have to apply restrictions on construction and vehicles that would alienate the builder and transport lobbies Mukul Kesavan Delhi’s air is unhealthy the year round, but in December and January it’s poisonous. When the chief minister, Rekha Gupta, arrived at a smog-filled Arun Jaitley… Read More Capital punishment
++++++Readers outside of India can donate hereto support Mainstream Weeklyhttps://tinyurl.com/2rsy4ss6++++++ In this issue: DOCUMENTS IMAGE & SOUND Editor’s Picks: * (Coverpage artwork: Stuff, Photo by Harsh Kapoor Dec 25, 2025) https://mainstreamweekly.net/article16441.html
NB: A blurb for a book of philosophical essays asks if ours is the era of ‘faint-hearted’ philosophy, because we were/are not ‘able to bear the greatness, the immensity of the claims made by the human spirit.’ The ongoing ideological assault on the mind and the very soul of humanity point to the widespread failures… Read More Natalia Ginzburg: Our Monstrous Ideas
NB: Those who bang on about Macaulay’s Minute on education (1835) should acquaint themselves with this early Indian patriot, whose work in education inspired a generation and who preceded Macaulay by many years. DS The men of Young Bengal emerge not as pale imitations of British liberals, but as creative political thinkers who addressed India’s… Read More ‘India’s First Radicals’ argues for a generous assessment of 19th-century Indian intellectual life
Shobhit Mahajan The Tribune, 16 December, 2025 Chat GPT and Google Gemini are rapidly becoming the go-to places for students. That by itself is not surprising-after all generations of students have found ways to avoid rigor and skirt around academic engagement. Champion Guides (which condensed the whole course into a pocket-sized paperback) were followed by… Read More As AI replaces thinking, learning is eroding
This article was authored in June 2024. It appears in our fifth print issue, Contra Temps, available here Buber had written that for “political Zionism,” “the State is the goal and Zion a ‘myth’ that inflames the masses.” That propaganda employed to shore up nationalist militarism and settler-colonialism could leverage European guilt to “distort and exploit respectable… Read More Zionism Breaks
NB: This article is interesting but open to caveats. One does not have to be a Putinist or Russian chauvinist to object to the statement that Russia started World War II by signing the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in August 1939 (see below); simply aware of historical facts. Were Britain and France responsible for WW2 becuase they… Read More Investigating Putinism: History Over Ideology
In post-May Paris, a mysterious Maoist activist, Fernando, brings about a dozen of people to form a revolutionary group. Studying this charismatic-led organization allows Julie Pagis to deepen our understanding of Weberian domination through sociological enlightenments by David Copello , 25 November What became of the activists of May ’68? The question of the long-term… Read More A Maoist Enigma in Post-May France
After the truth-shower 