Nayanjot Lahiri I first met Basudev (lovingly called ‘Robi’) Chatterji in 1978 when I was an undergraduate student and he a lecturer at St. Stephen’s college. Over the years, he appeared in various avataras in my life – as a mentor, as a friend, later as a colleague. Apart from university corridors, I met him… Read More Basudev Chatterji
First posted August 4, 2018 In 1996, Professor Pierre Ryckmans (Simon Leys) presented the ABC Boyer Lectures. Subsequently published under the title The View from the Bridge the lectures were serialised in four parts in China Heritage Quarterly with the permission of the author. The first lecture was called Learning (some introductory paragraphs are given below; but the link will… Read More Simon Leys: The View from the Bridge. His lectures on Learning, Reading, Writing and Going Abroad and Staying Home (1996)
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
First posted August 31, 2017 The true and durable path into and through experience involves being true … to your own solitude, true to your own secret knowledge. Seamus Heaney you’ve got to tell the world how to treat you [because] if the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are… Read More Seamus Heaney’s Advice to the Young. By Maria Popova
The Three Questions, by Leo Tolstoy It once occurred to a certain king that if he always knew the right time to begin everything; if he knew who were the right people to listen to, and whom to avoid; and, above all, if he always knew what was the most important thing to do, he would… Read More Leo Tolstoy: The Three Questions (1885) / Lu Xun: Waiting for a Genius (1924)
In use since 2017, the existing set of school textbooks in Karnataka were certainly in need of revision: many of the chapters in sociology were outdated, the discussions in economics, political science, history and geography drab and listless, and typographical and grammatical errors were found in the hundreds in the social science books. But the… Read More Chandan Gowda: Keep party politics out of textbooks!
Over the past two centuries, most critiques of modernity have fallen into one of two camps. The first tends to see the modern age as the spawn of the tragic dissolution of Christian civilization, which had provided stable meaning and order for over a millennium, while the second emphasizes the failures of modernity to fulfill… Read More Book review: The Corruption of the Best – On Ivan Illich
This article is directed at the Indian diaspora worldwide. Read the article to find out why. Fifty years ago a young girl selling flowers on a city street in India wasn’t going to be a candidate for the civil services or even graduate from high school. At best, she’d become domestic help. That was… Read More Amit Shah: I am lazy. How do I change that?
A Delhi University professor has been booked for an allegedly objectionable social media post on the claims of a ‘Shivling’ being found at the Gyanvapi mosque in Varanasi. Ratan Lal, an associate professor of history at the Hindu College, has been booked under IPC sections 153-A (promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion,… Read More Hindu College history professor booked for post on Gyanvapi ‘Shivling’ / Teachers, students demand immediate release of associate professor Ratan Lal
Letter to the Readers, Mainstream, April 23, 2022 Climate Change 2022 Report: Act Now to Avert Catastrophic Events | K N Ninan Earth Day re-emphasizes need for resolving the survival crisis | Bharat Dogra Making Sense of IMF’s Institutional View on Capital Flows | Kavaljit Singh Jammu and Kashmir: Tenth Report Of The Concerned Citizens’ Group Alas, Hindi… Read More Mainstream, April 23, 2022 / Ramjas History students bid farewell to retiring teacher
After the truth-shower 