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
He and I had quarreled. A quarrel doesn’t matter – even if those who quarrel never see each other again – just another way of living together without losing sight of one another in the narrow little world that is allotted us. It didn’t. keep me from thinking of him, from feeling that his eyes… Read More Jean-Paul Sartre: Tribute to Albert Camus (February 1960)
KUNAL DUTT NB: Like Kishanji, resident of Varanasi (quoted below) I too was a small boy, just less than eleven years of age, when Queen Elizabeth arrived in Delhi in January 1961. Us schoolchildren (from what is now called the Army Public School), were taken to Sardar Patel road, to welcome her. We stood on… Read More When the Queen came calling in 1961
Nayanjot Lahiri I first met Basudev (lovingly called ‘Robi’) Chatterji in 1978 when I was an undergraduate student and he a lecturer at St. Stephen’s college. Over the years, he appeared in various avataras in my life – as a mentor, as a friend, later as a colleague. Apart from university corridors, I met him… Read More Basudev Chatterji
After the truth-shower 