“Just an old man in a loincloth in distant India: Yet when he died, humanity wept.” The most punctual man in India…of Mahatma Gandhi’s few possessions, his watches were the most beloved. His watch stopped at 5.12 pm on January 30, 1948 First posted February 06, 2015 The watch never left his side. It was the… Read More Nina Martyris on the trustee of time
Two examples from mediaeval Odisha’s bhakti tradition show how debates and differences about the sacred were part of devotional practice, and not forced onto us after the institutionalisation of modern, secular, and democratic visions… Each bhakt’s quest toward their own self, or own language, was a gesture to a universal appeal. ABINASH DASH CHOUDHURY Over… Read More Encountering the Bhakt: Transformation in Religious Thought
There is a deeper systemic rot that goes far beyond seeing this crisis as an episodic event embedded in the NEET scandal. Deepanshu Mohan, 360info Sonipat: Exam paper leaks cause immense damage to the psychological state of India’s younger generation in pursuit of a better, more progressive future. The NEET exam scandal has emerged as an… Read More The NEET Exam Leaks Controversy And Its Implications For Indian Youth
Heinrich Heine, arguably one of the most famous of German authors, had prophetically announced that wherever they burn books, they will one day burn humans. Pramod K. Nayar German cultural production, as is well known, in the decades leading to Nazidom set about creating a ‘national’ culture by destroying Jewish, communist, humanist and other artwork,… Read More Burning Books and The Nazification of Literature
Everywhere stars rise to power as charismatic demagogues and risk-takers, but these very qualities breed in them an implacable desire to control all power and push away all they see as worthy replacements. Mrinal Pande Somewhere one had come across a story about ageing penguins. It said that a sleepy penguin may float atop the… Read More Yayati Syndrome: The Unreasonable Power Hunger of Ageing Men
I was searching for meaning and purpose so I became an academic philosopher. Reader, you might guess what happened next Pranay Sanklecha Why did you decide to study philosophy?’ asked the Harvard professor, sitting in the park in his cream linen suit. ‘Because I want to find out how to live,’ I said. ‘I want… Read More Philosophy was once alive
Readers who are parents might be forgiven for thinking that Alice Munro who blamed her abused daughter for her husband’s paedophilia was a sociopath whose condition might have a bearing on her books. (Alice Munro claimed her daughter was lying about being abused by stepfather) Mukul Kesavan A year and a half ago, while moving… Read More Life and Fiction
First posted October 06, 2012 Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan. Edited by Noel Malcolm. Oxford University Press; 2,355 pages WHEN Thomas Hobbes was maths tutor to the future English king, Charles II, in Paris in 1646, his young charge reportedly found Britain’s first great modern philosopher to be “the oddest fellow he ever met with”. That was one of… Read More After more than 350 years, the first critical edition of Hobbes’s ‘Leviathan’
First posted February 28, 2014 In Culture and the Death of God he deploys all his formidable skills to explain how the high hopes of many generations of secular materialists collapsed along with the twin towers. Culture and the Death of God – Terry Eagletonreviewed by Jonathan Rée Atheism is in trouble, according to Terry Eagleton. Throughout the 20th century it… Read More Culture and the Death of God: Terry Eagleton
First posted July 06, 2012 As one distraught friend of mine once prayed: ‘May Allah save Islam from Pakistan.’ The self-claimed ‘bastion of Islam’ has gradually mutated into becoming a bastion of deluded messiahs and mindless, violent ranting machines to whom anything, from incoherent malangs to the reopening of Nato supply routes, are conspiracies against Islam. On… Read More EXIT GOD, ENTER MADNESS: Nadeem Paracha on religious extremism in Pakistan (2012)
After the truth-shower 