NB: This post was taken from a HuffPost article in 2017 (the link is void now) and posted by me on Blogger on July 17, 2017. Maliha was a student of mine at the Young India Fellowship at Ashoka University. I might add that she was an excellent scholar. I would like to share this with… Read More Dear Bharat Mata, I’m Your Pakistani Daughter And I Love You. By Maliha Khan
In 1999, the Tibetan writer Tsering Woeser came across Wang Lixiong’s book “Sky Burial: The Fate of Tibet.” On finishing it, she sent Mr. Wang photographs taken by her father, who was with the People’s Liberation Army when it entered Tibet in the 1950s and documented the early years of the Cultural Revolution in Lhasa in the 1960s.… Read More The Cultural Revolution in Tibet: A Photographic Record. By LUO SILING
The Soviet Union lasted less than 75 years even if reckoned from 1917. Independent India has now crossed that threshold and that is a reason for satisfaction. The Indian experiment has been no less bold than the Soviet if only because the challenges it has faced have been at least equally profound. Both Russia and… Read More Anil Nauriya: 75 Years of Independent India
there are indications that Pakistan and Saudi Arabia may have had prior knowledge that the coup d’etat would take place. Both countries recognised the “Islamic Republic of Bangladesh” very soon after Mujib’s death. Clearly, this represented some level of coordination between Islamabad and Riyadh. The coincidence is simply too coincidental… Lawrence Lifschultz has been writing… Read More Conversation with Lawrence Lifschultz (2014): The reporter who investigated the assassination of Mujibur Rahman
I read a lot of biographies, these often set in other countries than my own. A book I have just finished is Benedetto Croce and Italian Fascism, by the Canadian scholar, Fabio Fernando Rizi. It uses the life of a great philosopher to tell a larger story of the times he passed through. Reading Rizi’s book,… Read More Ramachandra Guha: Reading about Mussolini’s Italy in Modi’s India
The CIA’s Intervention in Afghanistan: Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, 15-21 January 1998 Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Adviser to Jimmy Carter, Dies at 89 Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs [“From the Shadows”], that American intelligence services began to aid… Read More The CIA’s Intervention in Afghanistan: Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Paris, 15-21 January 1998
I thought about the terrible uselessness of suffering. Love leaves behind its creation-the next generation coming into the world; the continuation of humanity. But suffering? Such a great part of human experience, the most difficult and painful, passes leaving no trace. If one were to collect the energy of suffering emitted by the millions of… Read More Book review: Imperium by Ryszard Kapuściński (1993)
Algerian Chronicles by Albert CamusReviewed by George Scialabba The problem of revolutionary violence was perhaps the most fateful question of political morality in the twentieth century. Two texts are indispensable to anyone wanting to engage that question: Camus’s “Neither Victims nor Executioners” (1946) and Sartre’s introduction to The Wretched of the Earth (1961), written one… Read More Book review: Resistance, Rebellion & Writing. Albert Camus’s dispatches on the Algerian crisis
First posted October 10, 2013 NB: The operative aspect of this case may be seen in the highlighted part of para 1 (emphasis added). It is well-known that a large number of temples all over the Kashmir Valley have been desecrated and/or abandoned. According to Sanjay Tickoo, President of the Kashmiri Pandit Sangharsh Samiti the figure runs into… Read More High Court of Jammu & Kashmir upholds Sanjay Tickoo’s petition for protection of religious places and castigates communal versions of nationalism
Driving down Prithviraj Road, one of New Delhi’s famously leafy avenues, I passed a lane that opened on to it. The street sign said “Aurangzeb Lane”. Aurangzeb Road might have morphed into A.P.J. Abdul Kalam Road, but the emperor lives on, if only in a little feeder lane. Of the roads that commemorate Mughal emperors, all… Read More Mukul Kesavan: Delhi’s roads tell the story of the republic
