First posted May 3, 2017 NB: This article appeared under the title 50 years of Naxalbari in CatchNews on May 1, 2017. I post it below with my original title. It is the first of two articles I wrote about the first phase of Naxalism. The second appeared in Outlook on May 15, I’ve posted it here: Yesterday once more. I take… Read More Annihilation – 50 years of Naxalbari
First posted May 6, 2017 NB: This is the second of two pieces that I have written for publication on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Naxalbari. It has appeared today in Outlook. I post it here under the title that I gave it. The first one was entitled Annihilation. And this post has photos from a… Read More Yesterday once more – 50 years after Naxalbari
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 June, 2021 NB: George Orwell was born in Motihari, Bihar, in 1903. I posted this video and collection of links on him in 2013, but find it necessary to remind ourselves of his continuing relevance. This was his final warning; and a full documentary of his life may be found here. With the… Read More George Orwell’s Final Warning: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever”
First posted December 3, 2016 Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion By Gareth Stedman Jones; Reviewed by Jeremy Adelman While Jenny was dying, Marx wrote a letter to the Russian Group for the Emancipation of Labour in Geneva on the question: was communal property good? Stedman Jones ends Karl Marx with a story about the fate of… Read More Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion
First posted November 11, 2017 Madhavan Palat Utopia is a place or as it literally means, a no place, in Thomas More’s Greek pun, one that does not exist, cannot exist, but ideally should come into being as the good place, the Eutopia. Many utopian projects, be it beauty that never fades or the return… Read More Madhavan Palat: Utopia and Dystopia in Revolutionary Russia
Rohini Hensman Christianity came to India and Sri Lanka from other countries at various periods ranging from ancient times to the present. Therefore a general view of the link between Christianity and capitalism (or anti-capitalism) is necessary in order to understand how the specific relationship between Christianity and capitalism (or anti-capitalism) developed in these two… Read More Christianity and Capitalism in India and Sri Lanka
First posted July 28, 2017 Life and Fate was written in the late 1950’s & confiscated by the Soviet authorities. It was published in the West in 1980, and in Russia in 1988. Grossman died in 1964. Linda Grant says of it: ‘Novels fade, your immersion in their world turns into a faint dream, and then is forgotten. Only… Read More The manuscript that was arrested: Linda Grant on Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate
First posted June 21, 2014 The Zhivago Affair by Peter Finn and Petra Couvee Reviewed by Adam Kirsch More than Christianity, however, life itself is Zhivago’s sacred value – his name is related to the Russian word for life – and he despises every ideology that claims to be superior to life, to be able to… Read More The Zhivago Affair: one of the Cold War’s most fascinating cultural skirmishes / Boris Pasternak’s refusal of The Nobel Prize. His son’s memoirs
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
After the truth-shower 