William Shakespeare (aka William Sexpeare in Waste Bengal) had got most things right, especially when it came to portraying the seven deadly sins, as per their revised version in India’s Amritkaal. Whether it was “honour killing” in Othello or “love jihad” (by Romeo, naturally, trying to entice a Capulet to become a Montague) in Romeo… Read More Avay Shukla: ‘A rose by any other name..’ really?
Who controls the past, controls the future; who controls the present, controls the past: George Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty four The will cannot will backwards… That time does not run backward, that is his wrath; ‘that which was’ is the name of the stone he cannot move. And so he moves stones out of wrath… Read More Rectifying the past
Knowledge is a deadly friend / When no-one sets the rules The fate of all mankind I see / Is in the hands of fools. The wall on which the prophets wrote Is cracking at the seams. Upon the instruments of death The sunlight brightly gleams. When every man is torn apart With nightmares and… Read More King Crimson – Epitaph
Respected colleagues, In the light of the deletions of several crucial themes from school textbooks produced by the NCERT, the following statement has been drafted. You would agree that the entire “rationalization” of textbooks is a process that is questionable and one which has wrongly excluded the informed opinion and expertise of the actual community of… Read More Public statement of historians on changes in school History textbooks of the NCERT
White Bird: It’s A Beautiful Day -1968 NB: The NLF marched into Saigon on April 30, 1975. Whatever we did as comrades, was above all motivated by love and solidarity with the heroic Vietnamese people. I remember on that day, rushing to the DRV Embassy on Prithviraj Road and embracing the first Vietnamese diplomat I… Read More Vietnam: Epitaph of a soldier
Jonathan Freedland I look at the contrasting journeys taken by Northern Ireland and by Israel in the last 25 years and conclude that one got on the right train and the other missed it – with consequences that get only more tragic. To be sure, not everything in Northern Ireland is rosy. The institutions of self-government remain… Read More Netanyahu is leading a coup against his own country. But the threat is not only to Israel
Stalin through the journalism of his time: H.R. Knickerbocker’s interview with Ekaterina Geladze; Gareth Jones’s exposé of the Holodomor; W.E.B. Du Bois’s homage to a freedom fighter; and Raymond Aron’s optimism in 1956. Internazionale Storia 5 (2023) On the 70th anniversary of Stalin’s death, a special issue of Internazionale looks at the life and significance of the… Read More ‘The end of the big lie’
Sihem Bensedrine I was relieved when Hervé, a young man from Ivory Coast who occasionally helps me around the house, finally called. It had been four agonising days of radio silence. Since his landlady had evicted him, he had been wandering the streets of Raoued, a suburb of Tunis, trying to avoid the marauding gangs.… Read More A poisonous dictatorship has been built in Tunisia, the birthplace of the Arab spring
Thomas Rowley The day started with Russian law enforcement searching the homes of nine senior members of the country’s oldest human rights organisation, Memorial. Apparently, there was reason to believe that these Nobel Prize-winning historians and rights defenders had been “rehabilitating Nazism”. Investigators had allegedly found that three names on Memorial’s list of historical “Victims… Read More Russia targets its oldest human rights group, Memorial
The Dream of Karabakh, about a woman’s attachment to her village, is rooted in personal memories that cannot be moved, unlike borders Lucia De La Torre I first met Shushan in February 2021. The mother of five was living in Landjazat village, near Armenia’s barbed-wire border with Turkey. The house, which belonged to some of… Read More New film focuses on love – not war – in Nagorno-Karabakh
