NB: Accepting an award in the name of a prime suspect in the Mahatma Gandhi murder case is but a logical step forward from playing to-ey to-ey with brazen Savarkarites and Godse-ites. Not all patriots are scoundrels; but all scoundrels are definitely patriots. Wit is no substitute for wisdom, Shashi. Your performance is becoming cringeworthy.… Read More Refusing Savarkar award exposes Shashi Tharoor’s dilemma
NB: Anyone with the faintest idea of what is happening to Indian education will understand the importance of this book by this esteemed and highly accomplished scholar. The policies of our rulers can be described as nothing less than assault on education. Government enthusiasts could ask themselves why every year, hundreds of thousands of Indian… Read More Scholar GN Devy asks whether India risks becoming an anti-knowledge nation
NB: I appreciate this author’s empathetic understanding of religion, especially this sentence: of my three particular political heroes, only one – Dr King – is a Christian. Gandhi was Hindu, and his colleague, the too-little-known Abdul Ghaffar Khan – was a Muslim. I learned something special in this line: Philoxenia is the Greek term used… Read More They’re doing to America what they did to Christianity
Where the postcolonial Left meets the Hindu Right NB: This is an interesting overview, although I cannot agree with some of the author’s arguments. For instance, I think it is true that Hindutva marks an attempt to recast Sanatan Dharma as an Abrahamic-style faith; the main objective being homogeneity and subjugation of an entire population… Read More India’s Conservative Revolution
NB: Either you’ve never heard of these events and happenings – or, even if you have, they are not spoken about much. The younger generation, the ones who will live through more of this century than I will, may find these matters to be necessary knowledge. I will add to this list from time to… Read More Things the mainstream don’t talk about
Essays in Contemporary History and Politics My book’s title is taken from the first article in the list below. It is dedicated to Sita Ram Mali, and my students and colleagues from Ramjas College from when I taught there, during the years 1974 to 1994 Dear readers: this book is a selection of my articles and… Read More Closing the Circle
the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction … no longer exists: Hannah Arendt NB: The author asks: If the first term of Donald Trump provoked anxiety over the fate of objective knowledge, the second has led to claims we live… Read More A critique of pure stupidity: understanding Trump 2.0
Dragged by her hair, incessantly punched and kicked, stripped naked, wrapped in an Israeli flag, sexually humiliated in her own language (lilla hora, “little whore;” hora Greta, “Greta whore”), threatened with gassing (revealing detail, this), uniformed guards all the while taking “selfie” photographs as they stand next to her laughing and jeering: What is this about,… Read More This is how the ‘most moral army in the world’ treated Greta Thunberg / The Liberal Abandonment of Greta Thunberg
They make a desert, they call it peace: These plunderers of the world [the Romans], after exhausting the land by their devastations, are rifling the ocean: stimulated by avarice, if their enemy be rich; by ambition, if poor; unsatiated by the East and by the West: the only people who behold wealth & indigence with… Read More The shameless racists who perpetrated Gaza’s genocide pose as its saviours, survivors return home – to a wasteland
NB: I respect this writer and this film maker for speaking the truth as far as their resources allow. The term community of crime is something terrifying because it reflects the truth about the fragility of human consience; and the power that ideologies possess to pervert the conscience into its opposite; to literally create communities… Read More Two years after the massacre, I look back in disbelief. I, too, missed the October 8 surprise / ‘If 1948 was a war of Independence, the current war could be the one that ends Israel’
After the truth-shower 