Prem Shankar Jha The following are excerpts from The Dismantling of India’s Democracy: 1947 to 2025 by Prem Shankar Jha; reproduced with permission from the publisher, Speaking Tiger. Over the decade since Narendra Modi has been the prime minister of India, at the head of a BJP government supported by a few local allies in the states… Read More Narendra Modi’s Step by Step Journey Towards Creating Fascism in India
Gideon Levy Pablo Picasso painted his famous picture in response to the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica on April 26, 1937. We now have a modern filmed version from Gaza. This report by Gideon Levy, in Haaretz, July 13, 2025 // The people of Guernica, which was bombed by fascists and Nazis during… Read More Gaza’s Guernica / Guernica stands in solidarity with Gaza (2024)
This impeccably sourced account of the secretive agency during a period of global turmoil deserves a Pulitzer John Simpson In 1976 when we were both based in Brussels, my BBC mentor, the great Charles Wheeler, came back to the office from a grand US embassy party one evening and remarked: “The cleverest and most entertaining… Read More The Mission by Tim Weiner: Unmasking the CIA
Based on classified documents and first-person interviews, a startling history of the American war on Vietnamese civilians. Turse’s central aim in Kill Anything that Moves is to expose the unparalleled obscenity of the Vietnam War: unparalleled both in terms of the devastating scale and variety of harm done and the diabolical levels of premeditation on the part of the… Read More Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam
Chandan Gowda After publishing several major Kannada stories in Prajavani and other publications in Mysore state, the nineteen-year-old Rajalakshmi N. Rao published The Rain, her scintillating debut story in English, in The Illustrated Weekly of India in late 1954. On the heels of the buzz around this story by a Kannada writer, B R Nagaraj,… Read More A precious discovery: The Living Stream
First posted June 19, 2016 “Islamic civilization developed a construct of history that labeled the pre-Islamic period the Age of Ignorance and projected Islam as the sole source of all that was civilized – and used that construct so effectively in its rewriting of history that the peoples of Middle East lost all knowledge of… Read More S. B. Zaki: Arab women before and after Islam. Opening the door of pre-Islamic Arabian history
by Mark Cartwright The Mongols conquered vast swathes of Asia in the 13th and 14th century CE thanks to their fast light cavalry and excellent bowmen, but another significant contribution to their success was the adoption of their enemies’ tactics and technology that allowed them to defeat established military powers in China, Persia, and Eastern Europe. Adapting to different challenges and… Read More Mongol Warfare
Running On Empty Lookin’ out at the road rushin’ under my wheelsLookin’ back at the years gone by like so many summer fieldsIn ’65 I was seventeen and runnin’ up 101I don’t know where I’m runnin’ now, I’m just runnin’ on runnin’ on empty(Runnin’ on) runnin’ blind(Runnin’ on) runnin’ into the sunBut I’m runnin’ behind… Read More Jackson Browne: Running On Empty (1977)
Mapping the hidden structure of an unaccountable organisation “in the case of secret organisation like the RSS which has no records of membership, no registers etc., securing of authentic information whether a person is an active member or not is a very difficult task.” (Selected Correspondence of Sardar Patel; edited by Durga Das; vol 6, p… Read More The RSS Does Not Exist – on paper
One of the major causes of war is industry. When industry and economics go hand in hand with politics they must inevitably sustain a separative activity to maintain the economic stature. All countries are doing this, the great and the small. The small are being armed by the big, some quietly, surreptitiously, others openly. Is the… Read More Krishnamurti on War
After the truth-shower 