Tag: History

The Fractured Trajectory of Scientific Management and the Rationalization of Labor

By Judi Auderset (Referenced in Adam Tooze, Chartbook, June 12, 2023) Abstract: Scientific management and work rationalization are usually associated with the rise of industrial capitalism and factory labor. This narrow perspective, however, obscures the rural and agricultural spaces in which practices of labor management and work rationalization were important throughout the 19th and 20th… Read More The Fractured Trajectory of Scientific Management and the Rationalization of Labor

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Nakul Krishna on A. K. Ramanujan: The literary legacy of an Indian modernist / The essay censored by DU’s Academic Council

First posted August 15, 2013 “Yes, I know all that. I should be modern” – begins Ramanujan’s ‘Conventions of Despair’. Others in India have felt this impulse, and it has pulled them in different directions. In politics, it has drawn them towards nationalism, socialism and fascism. In religion, it has had similarly contradictory effects: either… Read More Nakul Krishna on A. K. Ramanujan: The literary legacy of an Indian modernist / The essay censored by DU’s Academic Council

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तुलसी ने लिखा था ‘संत हृदय नवनीत समाना’, आज होते तो ‘संत हृदय बुलडोज़र समाना’ लिखना पड़ता

क्या हुआ जब राम स्वप्न में आए? कुलदीप कुमार रात सपने में रामजी ने दर्शन दिए. मैं डायरी में कुछ लिखने का कठिन प्रयास कर रहा था. एक हाथ में कलम थी और दूसरे में मैग्नीफाइंग ग्लास. अचानक लगा कि कमरा किसी दिव्य सुगंध से भर उठा है. सिर उठाया तो देखा कि रामचंद्र जी… Read More तुलसी ने लिखा था ‘संत हृदय नवनीत समाना’, आज होते तो ‘संत हृदय बुलडोज़र समाना’ लिखना पड़ता

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Against homogenisation: Advancing diversity through Democratic Confederalism

The homogenic national society is the most artificial society to have ever been created and is the result of the “social engineering project… Due to its bureaucratic nature, Statism needs the homogenisation of space and time to function. It requires that within its borders, cultures and ways of life are melted into one singular artificial… Read More Against homogenisation: Advancing diversity through Democratic Confederalism

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What the West gets wrong on Stalin and Putin

The Western tendency to reduce mass-scale crime to an omnipotent leader has always been a misleading one. Even Stalinism was not the work of one man, but of the security services and individuals willing to denounce their fellow neighbors for housing rights or petty grievances, as the Kyiv-born Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov so mercilessly satires in… Read More What the West gets wrong on Stalin and Putin

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‘Baba’ – A Personal Tribute to Damodar Dharmanand Kosambi, by A. L. Basham

NB: D. D. Kosambi (1907-1966) was one of India’s most accomplished intellectuals. Hailing from Goa, he was a polyglot familiar with Konkani, Marathi, Hindi, Sanskrit, Pali, English, French, Italian and German (I may have missed some languages). He was a mathematician, statistician, geneticist, philologist, physicist, numismatist, archaeologist, historian and public intellectual (find a biography here). He… Read More ‘Baba’ – A Personal Tribute to Damodar Dharmanand Kosambi, by A. L. Basham

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Pratap Bhanu Mehta: What January 22 is, what it isn’t

There are moments in history that appear to drive wave after wave of people in a great torrent of catharsis, ecstasy, emotion and an elevated group mood that almost all conventional analysis, historical categories, moral measures and political prognosis seem beside the point. It would be foolish to deny that the pran pratishtha of Ram Lalla… Read More Pratap Bhanu Mehta: What January 22 is, what it isn’t

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The west’s complete contempt for the lives of Palestinians will not be forgotten

Our political and media elites are complicit in Gaza’s nightmare. Any vestige of moral authority has been lost for ever. Surely 10,000 children suffering violent deaths, or the 10 kids having one or both legs amputated each day, often without anaesthetic, would stir powerful emotions. Surely 5,500 pregnant women giving birth each month – many having caesareans without anaesthetic –… Read More The west’s complete contempt for the lives of Palestinians will not be forgotten

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Albert Camus on Tour

Vivian Gornick Nothing in a professional writer’s life more resembles the life of a traveling salesman than the literary book tour. The superficial difference between writers on tour and salesmen on the road is that writers are encouraged to imagine themselves prized personae whose pitch is eagerly awaited by the anonymous crowd, whereas salesmen know… Read More Albert Camus on Tour

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