NB: And why should Caesar be a tyrant then? / Poor man, I know he would not be a wolf,But that he sees the Romans are but sheep / He were no lion, were not the Romans hinds Shakespeare; Julius Caesar, (I.iii.103-6) DS By Mitali Saran The trouble with manufacturing a larger-than-life persona for a… Read More The measure of the man
Ours is the age of the intellectual organisation of political hatreds: Julien Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals; 1928 Once crime was as solitary as a cry of protest; now it is as universal as science. Yesterday it was put on trial; today it determines the law: Albert Camus, The Rebel, 1956 A BJP minister’s… Read More India’s subdivision of criminality (how one massacre deserves another)
Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke for 2 hours and 13 minutes in reply to the no-confidence motion that was defeated with the Opposition walking out. Modi spoke on Manipur for around 5 minutes and 30 seconds… The ‘record-breaking’ blah-sphemy: PM Modi speaks for 2 hours and 13 minutes in the Lok Sabha Some Right-wing social… Read More PM Modi speaks in the Lok Sabha / Rahul Gandhi on PM Modi: दिल्ली दरबार में डर.. रूकने को तैयार नहीं राहुल !
Juan Coleand / TomDispatch On July 24th, the Israeli Knesset passed a measure forbidding the country’s High Court of Justice from in any way checking the power of the government, whether in making cabinet decisions or appointments, based on what’s known as the “reasonability” standard. In the Israeli context, this was an extreme act, since right-wing parliamentarians… Read More West Bank crisis: How Israel occupied itself
In an open letter, 11 present and six retired IIMB faculty members said India’s internal security is ‘fragile…with an increasing risk of violent conflicts in the country’. Rashmi Belur A section of current and retired faculty members of the Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore (IIMB) have asked corporate leaders to “de-fund the spread of misinformation and… Read More Stop funding hate, IIM-Bangalore faculty tell corporates
Modi is an architect of fractures, that’s the credo with which he has marched since he deciphered, with diabolical clarity, the dividends of Gujarat 2002 Sankarshan Thakur There is a vice greater than the vice of bigotry and its attendant ills. It is the vice of giving it a free pass, the vice of collaboration.… Read More Death of the heart
The Indian government has brought in new rules that allow it to cancel pensions of retired bureaucrats who have served as high-ranking officers in some of the most coveted government jobs… Julio Ribeiro, a retired police officer said the new rules send the message that an officer should “not speak up and be pliant”. “They… Read More IAS, IPS and IFoS: Is India stifling criticism by retired bureaucrats?
John Bartlett in Santiago Days before Salvador Allende’s confirmation as Chile’s president in 1970, US President Richard Nixon met with a rightwing Chilean media mogul to discuss blocking the socialist leader’s path to the presidency, newly declassified documents have revealed. The documents, published in a new Spanish edition of the Pinochet files by archivist and writer Peter Kornbluh, include… Read More Files reveal Nixon’s role in plot to block Allende from Chilean presidency
I value George Orwell’s writing for his devotion to truthfulness and his recognition of all the ways that truths get corrupted. This is why, even if his private mores are of his time, his public writing still gives us tools to think about ours. By Rebecca Solnit The feminist writer Moira Donegan recently mocked contemporary social… Read More George Orwell in an age of moralists
QUESTIONING THE demolition drive in Nuh following communal violence last week, the Punjab and Haryana High Court Monday asked whether properties of a “particular community” were targeted “under the guise of a law and order problem”, and an “exercise of ethnic cleansing” was being conducted. Pointing to reports that demolition orders and notices were not… Read More Is Nuh demolition targeting a particular community? Punjab and Haryana HC
After the truth-shower 