The moment the middle class feels it has no access to a public good, it does everything it can to devalue it. The systematic destruction of Delhi University is a case study in elite secession Mukul Kesavan The death of Delhi University has gone unremarked. It isn’t formally dead; it still educates tens of thousands… Read More In memoriam
NB: This essay was published in Outlook magazine on April 11. DS Waiting Are we in a post-ideological age? No, we are submerged in it. The term ‘post-truth’ is merely an example of the impact of ideology on our speech habits. What does it mean? We can approach the meaning of the term ideology by… Read More The Crisis of Ideology
PRESS RELEASEFor Immediate Release: Ambedkar Jayanti Marks a Milestone: Release of Draft Policy for Strengthening Public Libraries in India by the Free Libraries Network5 PM, 13 April 2024, Press Club, New Delhi. [Delhi, April 3, 2024]: Commemorating the birth anniversary of Dr BR Ambedkar, the FreeLibraries Network announces the release of a landmark draft policy… Read More Free Libraries Network: Draft Policy for Strengthening Public Libraries in India
More concerning is the university and police’s promptness to align with ABVP’s ideology, disregarding their obligation to operate within the framework of the Constitution of India. Instead of penalising those who commit violence, they punish the victims of violence… The list of such institutions is long where the administration has acted like the authorities of… Read More Pondicherry Violence Sparks Question: Why Can’t India Interpret Hindu Gods?
Rouven J. Steeves Introduction: “The Light Shines in the Darkness . . .“ The study of politics presupposes the study of man. The study of man demands we consider the nature of being as ensouled flesh. This leads us into the realm of philosophy and, by extension, given that we are interested in man as… Read More Psychologists of Evil: Nietzsche and Dostoevsky on the Darkness of the Soul
NB: This essay has just been published in the latest issue of Outlook magazine. Happy Easter. DS Many years ago, in the mid 1990’s, I had occasion to hire a cab in Amsterdam. It was after dinner at a friends’ place. Once inside the cab it turned out the driver was an Indian immigrant. Or… Read More Khuda Hafiz
To be radical requires a theory of how this world, for all its problems, contains and is fostering the beginning of another, very different world. Jedediah Britton-Purdy All sorts of people had come to the Welsh countryside to spend the day talking about the history of labor radicalism: miners, organizers, researchers, politicians. But the star… Read More Raymond Williams’s Resources for Hope
NB: Observation by a psychoanalyst: The writer seems to know little about psychotherapy: what the latter does is validate the feelings of trauma, and provide empathy and support. How the person copes is best left to themselves and to whatever strategies, personal and collective they can creatively access or create. We all live through adolescence… Read More ‘We are all unwell’: a scholar’s radical approach to health
NB: Anyone concerned about the intellectual health of their country should recall what Mao’s regime did to China’s academic life under the so-called Cultural Revolution in the late 1960’s. This was Mao Zedong’s motivated assault on academics, intellectuals and on his critics in the Communist Party leadership. Professor Frank Dikotter’s research study of this momentous… Read More Where Are the ‘Don Quixotes’ of Indian Academia?
We look for loneliness inside our heads when its source lies all around us, in the destruction of collective life, the erosion of communal bonds, the ruin of civil society, the squeezing of public spaces. Kenan Malik ‘The hope that political action will gradually humanise industrial society has given way to a determination to survive… Read More We think loneliness is in our heads, but its source lies in the ruin of civil society
After the truth-shower 