NB: This is a fascinating account of one of the most deadly confrontations of modern times. I learned from it that Ayatollah Khomeini was less interested in religious orthodoxy than in seizing absolute power and cutting down moderate clerics to size, and used the book to assert his authority; that Rushdie’s assailant Hadi Matar, 26,… Read More Rushdie, Khomeini and Me
The spectacle is the guardian of sleep: Guy Debord # 136 The monotheistic religions were a compromise between myth and history, between the cyclical time that still governed the sphere of production and the irreversible time that was the theater of conflicts and regroupings among different peoples. The religions that evolved out of Judaism were… Read More Society of the Spectacle
By Morten Høi Jensen – March 25, 2016 IN THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN, Thomas Mann’s great novel of 1924, a young man travels to a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps intending to visit his tubercular cousin for three weeks but ends up staying seven years. Among many other experiences “up there,” the young Hans Castorp becomes audience to… Read More The Unbearable Pathos of Thomas Mann
Questions, observations, suggestions. The addressees should be able to recognise themselves अहंकार व्यक्ति के अज्ञान और मूर्खता का परिचायक है : गीता (३ / २७) The spectacle is the guardian of sleep: Guy Debord Good is self-existent, evil is not. It is like a parasite living in and around good. It will die of itself when… Read More Unsolicited thoughts from an elder citizen
The birds they singAt the break of day‘Start again,’ I heard them say‘Don’t dwell on what has passed awayAnd what is yet to be …’ – Leonard Cohen, Anthem +++++++++++ Hour by hour, life is kindly offered usWe have learned but little from yesterdayOf tomorrow, all knowledge is forbidden,And if I ever feared the coming… Read More The present is our happiness
जनमत कभी विचारधारा विहीन नहीं हो सकता लेकिन हमारे अंदर दार्शनिक साहस न हो तो हम खुद को नष्ट कर लेंगे दिलीप सिमियन This essay first appeared in Outlook magazine on April 11, under the title The Crisis of Ideology क्या हम उस युग में पहुंच चुके हैं जिसमें विचारधारा का अंत हो चुका है?… Read More विचारधारा का संकट
by Rakesh Shukla Raja bola raat haiMantri bola raat haiSantri bola raat haiYe subah subah subah ki baat hai : – Gorakh Pandey (King said its nightMinister said it is nightSentry said it was nightThis happening in the morning) It is universally recognized that plastic surgery and organ replacement were first performed in India. The evidence… Read More ‘Aham Brahmasmi’ – The Grandiose Self
Nearly 80 years since the Allied invasion, the testimony of Charles Shay, a 99-year-old former US army medic, reminds us of the significance of that day Andrew Anthony American D-Day veteran Charles Shay stands on a dune overlooking Omaha beach in Normandy where he landed as a 19-year-old. Photograph: Kiran Ridley/The Observer Next month will see… Read More June 6, 1944. What the last veterans can teach us all as D-Day fades from memory
How can the left escape burnout? Hannah Proctor; Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat SAM ADLER-BELL the left can sometimes become “more attached to its impossibility than to its potential fruitfulness, a Left that is most at home dwelling not in hopefulness but in its own marginality and failure, a Left that is thus caught… Read More Between Victory and Defeat
Ø दिलीप सिमियन कई साल पहले, 1990 के दशक के मध्य में मैं एम्सटर्डम में था और एक दोस्त के घर रात्रि भोजन करने के बाद एक टैक्सी से लौट रहा था. टैक्सी में बैठने के बाद पता चला कि टैक्सी ड्राइवर एक भारतीय प्रवासी था. या मुझे ऐसा लगा. मैंने उससे इस बारे में पूछा तो… Read More खुदा हाफ़िज़
After the truth-shower 