Chandan Gowda After publishing several major Kannada stories in Prajavani and other publications in Mysore state, the nineteen-year-old Rajalakshmi N. Rao published The Rain, her scintillating debut story in English, in The Illustrated Weekly of India in late 1954. On the heels of the buzz around this story by a Kannada writer, B R Nagaraj,… Read More A precious discovery: The Living Stream
First posted June 19, 2016 “Islamic civilization developed a construct of history that labeled the pre-Islamic period the Age of Ignorance and projected Islam as the sole source of all that was civilized – and used that construct so effectively in its rewriting of history that the peoples of Middle East lost all knowledge of… Read More S. B. Zaki: Arab women before and after Islam. Opening the door of pre-Islamic Arabian history
An Thuy Nguyen This article examines the political and diplomatic struggles in urban South Vietnam from the perspective of women in the Vietnamese Women’s Movement for the Right to Live (WRL) during the Vietnam War. This movement was a timely response to the American war of aggression, which had destroyed the fabric of South Vietnamese… Read More The Vietnam Women’s Movement for the Right to Live: a non-communist opposition movement to the American war in Vietnam
Letter to the Readers, Mainstream, Jan 4, 2025 DOCUMENTS: BOOKS: IMAGE & SOUND: Editor’s Picks Books of Note
Siyavash Shahabi Life in Iran under a totalitarian regime is a relentless performance, a dance of endurance. It’s like Tehching Hsieh and Linda Montano’s “Art/Life: One Year Performance 1983–1984,” where they tied themselves together by an 8-foot rope, day after day. The rope held them close but kept them apart, bound by rules but divided… Read More The Art of Survival in Iran’s Repressive Regime
सेना से रिटायर ब्रिगेडियर की बेटी के साथ पुलिस थाने के भीतर यौन हिंसा की घटना को लेकर किसे कोसा जाए। उस चुप्पी को कोसने लग जाए, जो अब राजनीतिक दल के हिसाब से ओढ़ ली जाती है या उन आवाज़ों को भी कोसने लग जाएं जिनके मुखर होने के बाद भी ऐसी घटनाएं नहीं… Read More सेना से रिटायर ब्रिगेडियर की बेटी के साथ पुलिस थाने के भीतर यौन हिंसा / How can you touch an Army officer, assault his fiance? Asks Maj. Gen Bishamber Dayal
Like all despots, major & petty, Mamata thrives on playing the victim. But now, faced with this horrendous instance of a genuine victim, her fake-victimhood shrivels up into a carbonised farce.. Just as global warming creates unpredictably cruel weather, corruption too creates its own hard rain. Ruchir Joshi On the evening of the day Rizwanur… Read More Stormy weather
Kambaiz Rafi Until the collapse of Afghanistan’s US-backed government in August 2021, few knew clearly what the Taliban wanted once they had returned to power. Some western officials and observers hoped for a big change from the regime, which had governed the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate in the 1990s. This time, they hoped, a more sophisticated and pragmatic vision might… Read More The Taliban’s harsh new vice and virtue laws are a throwback to the oppression of the 1990s
The brutal rape-murder of a junior doctor at Kolkata’s R G Kar Medical College and Hospital has an inescapable geography Saikat Majumdar The brutality of rape and murder elicits a reaction that is not only ethical and political in nature. It also evokes a response that is deeply aesthetic. By aesthetic I mean that visceral reaction to… Read More Beyond the Kolkata Rape And Murder, a history of medical corruption In West Bengal
“Instead of maintaining an uneasy alliance with the Trinamul Congress, and remaining silent about her misdeeds, the INDIA block should dump her and come out in open confrontation with her by leading a mass movement against her… My special appeal to my friend, MP Jawahar Sirkar and the women MPs Mohua Moitra and Sagarika Ghosh… Read More Bengal’s Godmother of ruffians and racketeers
After the truth-shower 