Gonzalo Pozo on Isaac Deutscher’s wartime years in London London Reviw of Books – Vol. 45 No. 3 · 2 February 2023 Isaac Deutscher , later the biographer of Trotsky and Stalin, was in the Warsaw flat of his closest friend, the political journalist Bernard Singer, early in October 1938 when the Wehrmacht’s entry into the Sudetenland was… Read More I must start completely alone
“A feeling grew on me that people didn’t talk about the things that really matter in human lives“ First posted January 26, 2018 Belarusian journalist and author Svetlana Alexievich was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature for her work documenting the lives of Soviet and post-Soviet citizens. Her latest project, about love, is the… Read More ‘Only love can save those who are infected with anger.’ Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich speaks to Staffan Julén
C. .M NAIM Last year, Urdu institutions in India celebrated a landmark in the history of that language—the 200th anniversary of the publication of Jam-i Jahan-Numa, the first modern newspaper in Urdu. It debuted on 27 March 1822, carrying a name that was clever and most befitting. It referred to the fabled “world-revealing goblet” of… Read More India’s Urdu Press: A Bitter-Sweet Bicentenary
Vidya Krishnan “Narendra Modi is directly responsible” for what happened in Gujarat in 2002. Those four words do more to acknowledge the grief inflicted on India’s Muslims, who have been at the receiving end of twenty years of gaslighting, than anything the government has done or said. In a documentary, the BBC—based on thoroughly reported… Read More What the BBC’s “Modi Question” reveals about India
By Albert Parry CENSORSHIP existed even be fore literature, say the Russians. And, we may add, cen sorship being older, literature has to be craftier. Hence, the new and re markably viable underground press in the Soviet Union called samizdat. The word is a play on Gosizdat, which is a telescoping of Gosudarstvennoye Izdatelstvo, the… Read More Samizdat: Russia’s Underground Press (1970)
First posted November 1, 2013 NB: On the 70th anniversary of his assassination, the Mahatma still haunts us, almost as if in answer to Sarojini Naidu’s broadcast of February 1, 1948: My Father, Do Not Rest. Given that the politics of his assassins grips a section of our ruling class and that malicious propaganda against him continues unabated, we would be doing ourselves a… Read More Gopalkrishna Gandhi: How the Indian cricket team reacted to the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi
Gandhiji has been killed by his own people for whose redemption he lived. This second crucifixion in the history of the world has been enacted on a Friday – the same day Jesus was done to death one thousand nine hundred and fifteen years ago Father forgive us These lines in white on a black… Read More The Lady Vanishes
There is always music, that deathless hope First posted January 22, 2013 When Barbara sings “Dis” to an absent lover, she is not just asking when he’ll return. She is showing she can get by without him. Alone is not that bad. There are other consolations. There is always music, that deathless hope. The post-war… Read More ‘But children are the same, In Paris or in Goettingen’: the song that made history. Will someone sing for us?
First posted January 29, 2015 Ahara-nidra-bhaya-maithunam ca // samanyam etat pasubhir naranamdharmo hi tesam adhiko viseso // dharmena hinah pasubhih samanah (Hunger, sleep, fear and sex are common to men and animals / What distinguishes men from animals is the knowledge of right and wrong) (Bhagwadgita; Tr S. Radhakrishnan, 1948, 1971, p 79) For the Hindi version… Read More The Abolition of truth
By Gerry Shih, Karishma Mehrotra. and. Anant Gupta Published in: The Washington PostDate: January 25, 2023 All told, the remarkable steps taken by the government seemed to reinforce a central point of the BBC series: that the world’s largest democracy was sliding into authoritarianism under Modi, who rose to national power in 2014 and won reelection in 2019 on a Hindu nationalist… Read More Censorship, arrests, power cuts. India scrambles to block BBC documentary
After the truth-shower 