K. Balagopal The public arena is witness to dispirited discussion of the ineffectiveness of people’s movements, which are at the most able to slow down things, and nothing more. The discussion often turns...
Read More →Srirupa Prasad The news of Ajmal Kasab’s execution was sudden. Like everyone, I too was stunned. Despite my being aware of the obvious. But what disturbed me deeply was the affective spectacle that...
Read More →Priyasha Mukhopadhyay The driving force behind every nation’s story of progress is a motor car In his introduction to Paul Virilio’s Speed and Politics Benjamin Bratton writes of how a...
Read More →Aryak Guha The Image-Event “A two and a half year old boy banging his head on the floor whenever he sees his mother is a very disturbing scene, but that is...
Read More →Arindam Chakrabarti Before Independence, patriotism often took the shape of mother-worship. The rhetoric of ‘sacrifice’ or balidaan bridged the gap between the political and the religious. In these post-patriotic times, should we, globalized urban intellectuals,...
Read More →Chandril Bhattacharya Is this Bashonti Sanyal who imprints red-lac dye and rubs lotus-petals on her palms. Is this Bashonti Mukherjee who lights candles every morning on the window sill so that her lover...
Read More →Saroj Giri Unfortunately Niall Ferguson has managed to distract Pankaj Mishra from the main theatre of empire-building today which is more than just western superiority or domination. Both reify ‘western domination’, crediting it...
Read More →Nikhil Biswas We credit the bravado of expressing our popping thoughts in immediate language smelling of fresh nascence. But in reality it is proven that the bravado is hollow, and worshiping that cleverness is devoid...
Read More →Nauman Naqvi What is the source of Islam’s potential for a beautiful, passive revolution today? How are the greater and lesser jihads distinct and entangled? What are the experiences of force given in...
Read More →Saroj Giri The black youth, together with the ‘feral scum’ of other colours, has always been stopped and searched, detained. But what happens when he stops and searches, detains the city? Clarence Road...
Read More →Amiya Dev We know that Châr Adhyây (Four Chapters) was Rabindranath’s second political novel. We also know that like Ghare-Bâire (The Home and the World), 1916, the first, it fared ill with nationalists,...
Read More →Varuni Bhatia The Strange Case of Baba Ramdev A young Yadav lad, the son of a low-income Haryana farmer, grows up in the decade of the seventies, the low-point of Nehruvian socialism. He...
Read More →Manindra Gupta (Trans. Abu Hossain) The fable of the Brahmin and the Brahmani used to be an amalgamation of the mythical and the folk. The duo lives in that hutment right at the yonder...
Read More →The 19 th century history of the Internal Wars of the New Zealanders is fascinating and gruesome. Tens of thousands of Maori died in the intertribal Musket Wars of the opening decades of...
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