First posted August 01, 2015 I got out my tape-recorder. My mum frowned. She wasn’t expecting that. “Is it for the Marx Memorial Library?” Because that was what old communists did: donated their body for medical research and their history for class analysis. But I just wanted to record what had happened. To remember Us.… Read More Jo McMillan – Lenin, mum and me: my communist childhood
Van Badham The western drift away from seeking moral instruction from the church is understandable; the morality plays staged every day on Reddit’s infamous “Am I the Asshole?” threads are far more entertaining. A few weeks ago, a post went viral in which the author seeks a public verdict on the question “AITA for asking… Read More The culture of mistrust is bleeding into our personal lives. No wonder there’s a sex recession
Rather than confront the inherent role of the university as a class-sorting mechanism (as well as an engine of the military-industrial complex),.. educators settled on a pedagogical model that valued the individual and immediate experiences of students over general civic and literary instruction. In lieu of learning a shared curriculum, students earned course credits through… Read More The Language of Democracy
And God made him die during the course of a hundred years and then He revived him and said:“How long have you been here?” / “A day, or part of a day,” he replied. The Koran, II 261 On the night of March 14, 1939, in an apartment on the Zelternergasse in Prague, Jaromir Hladik,… Read More Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘The Secret Miracle’ (1943)
a day after this tragedy, I noticed a serpentine line of students waiting to enter the very college where Samarveer had taught for over 5 years… the college was having its annual cultural festival. The irony of this temporal juxtaposition was presumably lost on the college authorities. Or maybe it is a sign of times… Read More Suicide of a teacher: Chronicle of a Tragedy Foretold
770,000 Indian students went abroad to study in 2022 alone Pulapre Balakrishnan In a recent article (IE, April 12, “The path of excellence”), R Subrahmanyam, a former secretary, higher education, addresses the issue of what is holding back India’s universities. The views of civil servants, publicly expressed, are important, for bureaucrats exert a significant influence… Read More India’s universities are coming apart, political class ignores damage caused by the exit of the ablest from the country
A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré; ed. Tim Cornwell by Peter Hitchens John le Carré, whose real name was David Cornwell, was Britain’s greatest novelist of the late twentieth century. He was also a sneaky government nark, who spied on his friends for the state. He sent damaging reports on them to the… Read More The double life of John le Carré
The rationalist in me knows that coincidences are inevitable, mundane, meaningless. But I can’t deny there is something strange and magical in them, too Paul Broks The term “coincidence” covers a wide range of phenomena, from the cosmic (in a total solar eclipse, the disc of the moon and the disc of the sun, by… Read More Are coincidences real ?
Chandan Gowda A young Sajjan horse trader, who had bought a couple of fine stallions at a horse fair and was taking them to sell at another fair in a neighbouring state, had been waylaid at night by Suguna horse vigilantes. They had demanded money to let him pass. When the horse trader refused saying… Read More A Miracle in Shanthinadu
Across the Atlantic, the suicide rate soared by 30% in the first 20 years of the 21st century. As the ‘war on drugs’ has escalated, so have deaths from substance abuse: in the US, they have grown exponentially since the 1970s, helping to drive the fall in life expectancy… Karl Marx described religion as the ‘sigh of the… Read More The ‘decline of the West’
After the truth-shower 