Prasanta Chakravarty On August 4, 1943, a few days before her death and amidst war, Simone Weil began to describe to her parents, Selma (Mime) and Bernard Weil (Biri), from her little room in London...
Anchita Ghatak There is a new story of intolerance everyday in my country. I no longer know whether these stories shock or upset me anymore. Or if they have become part of the background –...
Michael E. Veal A humid weekend night in the early 1990s. The scene: outside the Afrika Shrine nightclub in Ikeja, Lagos, Nigeria, home base of the legendary Nigerian musician Fela Anikulapo-Kuti and...
Joad Raymond Though already venerable the word pamphlet prospered in the 1580s, as its meanings shifted and it entered into common use. In 1716 Myles Davies claimed it as ‘a true-born English...
Amlan Das Gupta Two Photographs Let me start by telling you about two photographs (that I usually show), one taken probably in the early or mid- 1930s; the other in the early...
Henry David Thoreau I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles, commencing at my own door, without going by any house, without crossing a road except where the fox and the mink do:...
Aishwary Kumar In his final work The Buddha and His Dhamma, Bhimrao Ambedkar returns frequently to the concept of maitri, which he most often renders, for the first time in his essay on Marx, as...
Abhi Choudhury 1. Actually, every pronunciation has an objective. Some kind of outlandish and beautiful objective. As and when the speaker makes an utterance, every word brings forth a definite...
Henri Alleg from: The Algerian Memoirs And , since our house was one of the few with a working telephone—the other lines had been cut for lack of payment—people would drop by often to make a call...
William St Clair Last year, some of us were privileged to hear the first John Coffin Memorial Lecture given by Robert Darnton entitled ‘The Devil in the Holy Water.’ In that talk, by...
Jim Hinch One year ago this month, Harvard Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt stepped to the podium at the Cipriani Club in New York City to accept the National Book Award for nonfiction...