NB: This is a fascinating account of one of the most deadly confrontations of modern times. I learned from it that Ayatollah Khomeini was less interested in religious orthodoxy than in seizing absolute power and cutting down moderate clerics to size, and used the book to assert his authority; that Rushdie’s assailant Hadi Matar, 26,… Read More Rushdie, Khomeini and Me
By Morten Høi Jensen – March 25, 2016 IN THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN, Thomas Mann’s great novel of 1924, a young man travels to a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps intending to visit his tubercular cousin for three weeks but ends up staying seven years. Among many other experiences “up there,” the young Hans Castorp becomes audience to… Read More The Unbearable Pathos of Thomas Mann
NB: The systematic destruction of India’s criminal justice system is something that few bother to investigate. As a result we carry on as if nothing has happened. Mass carnage, rampant corruption, disappearance of witnesses, the mysterious death of a judge siting on a crucial case, death in custody of an 84 year old priest with… Read More Ex-Arunachal CM’s Explosive Suicide Note that the government refused to probe (2017)
@ Amnesty International On JUNE 4, 1989, hundreds – possibly thousands – of protesters peacefully calling for economic and social reforms were killed by troops around Tiananmen Square. Today, in the face of an escalating crackdown on free expression by the Chinese government, the memory of what happened on Tiananmen Square teeters on the brink of… Read More Remembering Tiananmen Square: Defending Memory Amidst Repression
For 40 years, Amit Shah has been at Narendra Modi’s side – his confidant, consigliere and enforcer. Today he is India’s second-most powerful man, and he is reshaping the country in radical ways Atul Dev A defining feature of life in India today is the suffocating atmosphere of menace and threat to critics of the… Read More ‘He likes scaring people’
NB: All ideologies are imploding, across the globe and across the spectrum. DS Mariam Lau Momentous change is afoot within Europe’s far right. Just as voters across 27 countries prepare to go to the polls in EU elections, a split over the German far right’s allegiance to the Third Reich is driving a realignment. The far-right Identity… Read More The AfD’s obsession with the Third Reich is driving a realignment of Europe’s far right
How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire. By Jack Weatherford The Mongol queens of the thirteenth century ruled the largest empire the world has ever known. Yet sometime near the end of the century, censors cut a section from The Secret History of the Mongols, leaving a single tantalizing quote from Genghis Khan: “Let us… Read More The Secret History of the Mongol Queens
GAZA casualties, live statistics There are lessons to be learned from our faith and history, as we watch the same dehumanization that fell upon my community now land upon another. Each day, I see photos of those displaced in Gaza, and I am reminded of my own family’s memory of loved ones killed in the… Read More Biden was my boss. As a Jew I cannot endorse the Gaza catastrophe / Phyllis Bennis Calls Out the US for Supporting Israel
Kannan Srinivasan in New York Even as colonialism & formal empire were abandoned, two key policies enabled the continued transfer of global wealth to the West. By the first, the US allowed Britain to effectively default <https://thewire.in/banking/how-india-paid-to-create-the-london-of-today> on its wartime debt to India (including Pakistan) & Egypt of money owed for exports to the United… Read More The Current Hegemony (criminality as policy)
जनमत कभी विचारधारा विहीन नहीं हो सकता लेकिन हमारे अंदर दार्शनिक साहस न हो तो हम खुद को नष्ट कर लेंगे दिलीप सिमियन This essay first appeared in Outlook magazine on April 11, under the title The Crisis of Ideology क्या हम उस युग में पहुंच चुके हैं जिसमें विचारधारा का अंत हो चुका है?… Read More विचारधारा का संकट
After the truth-shower 