First posted October 24, 2011 the shifting space, the stepoutside, away into another lifeon a street next to mine that drew me to itself, you and hera few bricks, some wood, a littlewithered grass, and children, shriekingas they played so save the hours, the days, the monthsthat you dreamt of a new spinein the universe,… Read More Salaam comrade
First posted January 23, 2012 Irena Sendler (1910-2008) was a Polish Catholic social worker who served in the Polish Underground and the Żegota resistance organization in German-occupied Warsaw during World War II. Assisted by some two dozen other Żegota members, Sendler saved 2,500 Jewish children by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto, providing them… Read More Remember this lady. In memory of Irena Sendler
GABRIEL WINANT While academic historians generally divide political economy, political history, and social history into three separate fields—the study of markets, the study of the state, and the study of ordinary people and communities—they were irreducibly fused for Davis. He certainly could do political economy with the best of them: I return often to his… Read More Mike Davis (1946-2022); lonely pillar of a more open Marxism
First posted August 28, 2014 NB: With love to our very own Mother Courage; to whom so many of us owe so much, and whom we still call Ma Sen. She passed away in the evening of November 18, 2024. There are no words to express what I, along with many friends of my generation,… Read More Nandita’s story. Calcutta, August 1945
Ironically, the late Asma Jahangir’s last public appearance and speech were at a demonstration led by Pashteen in Islamabad, February 2018, against the extrajudicial killing of a Pashtun youth in a ‘police encounter’ in Karachi in January 2018. The protest marked the launch of the PTM. Jahangir passed away just days later at her home in Lahore. Since then,… Read More Struggles for democracy and human rights in South Asia: Taking forward Asma Jahangir’s legacy
NB: This fearless intellectual, who defied the mighty Chinese Communist Party even as he fought for the freedom of the human mind, died in hospital on July 13, 2017, denied the right even to proper treatment. Beneath the image is an extract from Simon Ley’s review of Liu Xiaobo’s book, No Enemies, No Hatred. It… Read More The Legacy of Liu Xiaobo
NB: November 14, 2022, will be Jawaharlal Nehru’s 133rd birthday. It is celebrated as Children’s Day. DS Jamuna Solanke In the Nathjogi nomadic community, no girl had ever passed Class 10. With fierce determination, Jamuna Solanke, from a hamlet in Maharashtra’s Buldana district, has broken that barrier. This is her story On the day my… Read More ‘I will become what I want to become’
First posted January 24, 2017 Jerzy Krzyżanowski The Captive Mind (1953) has been compared to the two most revealing and penetrating works on the same subject previously published – Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Milosz was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980. Read an interview with him in 2003, the year before he… Read More The Captive Mind revisited
First posted October 29, 2022 Today is my father’s 104th birthday. Beneath the photograph (taken in the early 1960’s) are posts commemorating his centenary in 2018, (which contains a short account of his life) ; and a remembrance of Sainik School Kunjpura, of which he was the Founder Principal Lt Col Eric Simeon’s hundredth birthday:… Read More Lt Col Eric Simeon. October 29, 1918 – May 15, 2007
First posted on June 12, 2014, upon learning of his passing NB: Stanley Rosen passed away on May 4, 2014, in Philadelphia, USA. (Read an obituary here). I never met him, but only managed to convey my regards via a couple of messages. I was introduced to his writing about a decade ago, and was profoundly moved and… Read More Stanley Rosen (1929-2014). A great philosopher
After the truth-shower 