क्या हुआ जब राम स्वप्न में आए? कुलदीप कुमार रात सपने में रामजी ने दर्शन दिए. मैं डायरी में कुछ लिखने का कठिन प्रयास कर रहा था. एक हाथ में कलम थी और दूसरे में मैग्नीफाइंग ग्लास. अचानक लगा कि कमरा किसी दिव्य सुगंध से भर उठा है. सिर उठाया तो देखा कि रामचंद्र जी… Read More तुलसी ने लिखा था ‘संत हृदय नवनीत समाना’, आज होते तो ‘संत हृदय बुलडोज़र समाना’ लिखना पड़ता
The Babri Masjid ruling inaugurated a pattern where the Court berated the government or its favoured party, which still ended up on the winning side. Girish Shahane “The attempt to abrogate Article 370 is likely to meet its end in the Supreme Court”. That’s a line from a column I wrote after the Indian government radically changed… Read More Punishing victims, rewarding perpetrators: The Supreme Court’s creative contortions
Mrinal Pande A cluster of photos printed in a major English daily, the day after the week long rituals began in Ayodhya’s new Ram temple, confirms that our ‘Beti Padhao‘ and ‘Stree Sashkteekaran’ and various ‘Matru Kalyan Yojanas’ notwithstanding, the traditional gendered hierarchies remain firmly in place both on the streets and in the temple in Ayodhya. In… Read More What Happens in Ayodhya Doesn’t Stay in Ayodhya
There are moments in history that appear to drive wave after wave of people in a great torrent of catharsis, ecstasy, emotion and an elevated group mood that almost all conventional analysis, historical categories, moral measures and political prognosis seem beside the point. It would be foolish to deny that the pran pratishtha of Ram Lalla… Read More Pratap Bhanu Mehta: What January 22 is, what it isn’t
First posted January 24, 2014 The road to the offices inside Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics’ (IUCAA) Children Science Centre in Pune passes through a well-set, well-manicured lawn past the administrative buildings of the place. The tranquil atmosphere of the campus is broken only by the chaos in the room opposite his office. Noisy… Read More Toys from Trash: Teaching kids science using everyday objects / Visit Arvind Gupta’s Archive
Avay Shukla This last week has established that plumbing the depths of the ridiculous and the bizarre is not only our national pastime, it is also now the leitmotif of our society and ruling regime. The other day I decided I needed a “kurta”, not one of those fancy and expensive Myntra creations, but something… Read More Of Shankaracharyas and Cameracharyas
‘What would (Gandhi) have thought of a serving Chief Justice making public visits to temples and getting himself photographed and giving interviews about it in the process?’ Ramachandra Guha Ramachandra Guha, the well-known biographer of Mahatma Gandhi and one of India’s leading political commentators, discusses his articles criticising Chief Justice Chandrachud both for wrongly understanding… Read More Ramachandra Guha on the Chief Justice, Mahatma Gandhi and Saffron Robes
To accept that the spectacle about to be staged in Ayodhya can be extricated from politics is to sanctify the falsification of our living memory KAPIL KOMIREDDI There is no ritual that can sanitise the genesis of the temple that will be consecrated in Ayodhya on 22 January. It exists because the house of worship… Read More Ayodhya event not about Ram, but coronates Hindutva as state religion
Titled “Ayodhya: Where Divinity Meets Modernity,” the full-page colour ad that the Uttar Pradesh government put out in newspapers recently made me pause. Beneath the photos of the model Rama temple and of the CM of UP and the PM, the verbose ad claimed that the “double engine government” was “restoring” the “glory” of “the… Read More Chandan Gowda: Two Kinds of Hindus
Bharat Bhushan India-Maldives Row – Coercive diplomacy often backfires The Right-wing ecosystem, created and nurtured by the ruling BJP, has taken over, setting Indian diplomacy on a collision course with that of the tiny island nation Unless there was a deep-rooted controversy which ordinary mortals cannot fathom, it may not have been Prime Minister Modi’s intention to… Read More Old man at sea: The Maldives imbroglio
