The mindset of the university’s leadership is telling Zainab Firdausi NB: A timely reflection by an ex-student. The article speaks for itself. I will add some remarks about a scenario in which founders make sweeping public statements which subtract from the dignity of the Vice Chancellor and the academic community. To contrapose ‘Bhagat Singh’ with… Read More Ashoka University’s Reluctant Politics
Yan Shenkman A few months ago, I received a message from a random social media account in Russia, which asked me to sign an open letter in support of Russian political prisoner Azat Miftakhov. I knew the man behind the account, which has since been deleted; these days, he is ‘deep underground’, trying to stay… Read More Russia wants this young anarchist to stay in prison forever
Chrissy Stroop Elon Musk rarely states his own political views outright on X (formerly Twitter), other than to make vague nods in favour of “centrism” and “free speech” – one of his favourite topics – or to adopt a general “anti-woke” attitude. The owner of X has denounced the “woke mind virus” and even taken… Read More Elon Musk is using X to fuel right-wing hate in the US
NB: This is an astonishing declaration, The most outstanding Rusian conservative of the twentieth century, an ex-Red Army officer, imprisoned in the Gulag for eight years for criticising Stalin, expelled from his homeland, and winner of the Nobel Prize, still invoking the democratic spirit of the soviets of 1917; and asking for civil dialogue amongst… Read More Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Letter to the Soviet Leaders (1974)
Source: Adam Tooze: Chartbook Heroism Science is a peer-reviewed open source research journal that aims to advance heroism science theory, research, and application from a broad range of disciplinary perspectives … Heroism Science is the official journal of the Heroic Imagination Project. The field of heroism science is roughly two decades old. Since the year 2000, scholars have shown… Read More Heroism Science
Ashoka University’s treatment of Sabyasachi Das for his working paper on possible voter suppression in Indian elections has focused attention on the future of elite private universities in India Mukul Kesavan Ashoka University’s (henceforth Ashoka) treatment of Sabyasachi Das after he uploaded a working paper that touched on possible voter suppression in Indian elections has… Read More Ashokan Edicts
Lionel Trilling crystallizes the cynical Cold War liberalism that sacrificed idealism for self-restraint.. Organized as much against the left as the right, these defenses not only rang hollow; they have failed to forestall the political crisis they promised to transcend. The result has been the reversal of Cold War liberal triumph into today’s mood of… Read More Liberalism in Mourning
BRIAN KAREM On Wednesday, the news was all about a big bag of wind destroying Florida and flooding the South, spreading destruction and threatening pestilence and death. Then there’s Hurricane Idalia. Also on Wednesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell froze and stood motionless in front of an assembly of reporters — for the second time this… Read More The dumbing of America, from Reagan to Trump and beyond
First posted March 26, 2014 The Grand Inquisitor and the Holy Fool The Indian Council for Historical Research Foundation Day At the Nehru Memorial Museum & Library / 27 March 2014 at 5.30 pm Dostoevsky was a remarkably modern thinker who may seem to have laboured hard to obscure the fact. He grappled with the… Read More The Grand Inquisitor and the Holy Fool: Madhavan Palat’s lecture on Dostoevsky
Simone Weil’s thoughts on the unmaking of the self.. the postwar publication of the great bulk of her writings, including The Need for Roots, was overseen by one of her greatest admirers, Albert Camus. By Robert Zaretsky Eighty years ago on this date, one of the 20th century’s most unusual and unsettling thinkers died at… Read More The Decreationist
After the truth-shower 