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)
An interview with United Faculty for the Common Good ROTUA LUMBANTOBING, GABRIEL WINANT, TODD WOLFSON IN THE PROMISING EARLY DAYS of the Biden Administration, there occurred a moment—brief and soon forgotten—when it seemed like we might have a chance to repair the trainwreck of the higher-ed economy. During the debate on the omnibus social and domestic… Read More Do Much More to Meet This Moment
NB: Goodbye, Mr. Chips is a novella about the life of a school teacher, Mr. Chipping, written by English writer James Hilton, and published in 1934. I think it must be among the most beautiful love stories ever told. It also reminds us of the tremendous power of the human soul. My father took me… Read More Goodbye Mr Chips
NB: What is happening to Indian education is nothing short of organised crime. My heartfelt sympathy is due to the young people who are forced face so much tension and travail for absolutely no fault of theirs. It is not surprising that lacs of Indian students do their best, at great expense, to get educated… Read More Methodical destruction of the education system
After the truth-shower 