First posted on August 14, 2017 NB: Outlook asked me to write an article on ‘the decline of idealism’, with a focus on the Left. Here is what I wrote – it has appeared in the current issue under the title The Idea and its Mutant – DS Before discussing the idealism of the Left, it would be… Read More The decline of idealism
First posted on May 16, 2021 “The spectacle is the guardian of sleep”: Guy Debord – ‘But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence… illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be… Read More Society of the Spectacle / इमेज – Image: A Poem on Deaths in the Age of Covid
First posted November 3, 2017 NB: This essay has appeared in EPW’s special number commemorating the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution, which falls on November 7. (A Word file is downloadable here). The revolution began on February 23, 1917, (March 8 according to the new calendar adopted in 1918); but for complex reasons, tended to be identified with the… Read More The Bolshevik Heritage. By Dilip Simeon
First posted May 8, 2018 NB: This is a longer version of my review of this book which appeared in the April 2018 issue of Biblio. DS The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962–1976 By Frank Dikötter; Bloomsbury Press, 2016 The GPCR was yet another example of the totalitarian impulse, the open secret that motivates all… Read More Book review: The State as Faction: Mao’s Cultural Revolution
NB: World War Two began in Europe between September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland; and September 3, when Britain and France declared war on Germany. For China, the war began on September 18, 1931, when Japan invaded Manchuria and set up the puppet kingdom of Manchukuo. The Outbreak Of World War II A full-scale Japanese… Read More The Second World War
I know he had unusual eyesWhose powers no orders could determineNot to mistake the men he sawAs others did, for gods or vermin (Thomas Gunn, on a German soldier who risked his life to save Jews from deportation to the camps. Cited by Terry Eagleton, in Ideology, Verso, 1991, 2007; p xxii). What persuades men… Read More Evil
First posted September 6, 2013 The edge of oblivion – by Dilip Simeon(The Tribune Sept 6, 2013) The primitive mind is, in the fullest meaning of the word, imperishable: Sigmund Freud, 1915 The choice today is no longer between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence: Martin Luther King, 1958 Do the tense thoughts of… Read More The edge of oblivion
First posted December 5, 2011 By Dilip Simeon; published in Bruised Memories: Communal Violence and the Writer, by Tarun Saint (ed), Seagull Books, Calcutta, 2002 Early in the year of grace 1988 certain (dis)reputable members of the academic community in the University of Delhi organized a public address on an unspeakable subject by a reluctant speaker in an… Read More Venue for a Speech on Tamas: A Chronicle of an Event That Should Never Have Happened
My article in The Hindustan Times, 6 December 2000. (For those who may not know it, this date is the anniversary of the destruction of the Babri Masjid) In the year of grace 1989, I visited the Wagah border [India Pakistan Border] with a friend. It was evening, time for the lowering of flags, for the BSF and Pakistan… Read More A WHITE LINE AND A MOSQUE (December 2000)
NB: The title of my WordPress blog ‘After the truth shower’ originates in this poem, which was written one evening in 2010. I posted it on Blogger on October 12, 2012, after unsuccessfully attempting to publish it. It was written for my close friend Rabindra Ray (Lalloo), who passed away in January 2019. Here it… Read More My friend
After the truth-shower 