Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Why We Salute Mainstream
 in its Golden Jubilee

  3 January 2013, by Medha Patkar

  The Indian discourse on development has no doubt taken a new turn since the initiation of the globalisation-liberalisation paradigm and the free flow of the global capital as well as capitalist forces into our country. It is invariably realised that the inflow of not just the ‘capital’ but its interventionist influence has resulted in a tremendous change in the country’s landscape as well as the land use. The opening up of the land has made all our natural resources accessible and available (…)

• Media Scene Today

  3 January 2013, by Kuldip Nayar

  How soon does time fly away? Mainstream is fifty years old. Yet it seems only yesterday when Nikhil Chakarvartty founded the magazine. He wanted to give the intelligentsia a mainstream where streams of different thoughts would pour in. His belief was that every idea, however conservative or parochial, was worth debating.
  The contributor had every right to place his or her viewpoint freely and independently so that there was an interplay of ideas for a consensus to emerge. Even if there was (…)

• Mushahars of Mushahari

  3 January 2013, by D. Bandyopadhyay

  Long ago, in the late sixties of the last century, the Planning Commission of India constituted a Committee on Land Reforms under the chairmanship of Dr Z.A. Ahmed, a redoubtable CPI leader, who among other things distinguished himself as a strident and vociferous peasant leader betraying his own class interest. That way he was quite a “non-Marxist” as he went against the interests of the class to which he belonged. He came from a family of landlords in Uttar Pradesh. Having worked under (…)

• Don’t Forget the Golden Age

  3 January 2013, by T J S George

  In his acclaimed survey of history, Eric Hobsbawn marked the third quarter of the 20th century as a golden age in the West. His argu-ment was that industrial progress occurred in the postwar years alongside egalitarianism and rising living standards for all. Before long, however, income inequalities began widening in what some experts called the great U-turn. As the rich-poor gap grew, the golden age dimmed and democracy itself weakened.
  Hobsbawn’s theories have triggered debates. The (…)

• Fifty Years Young!

  3 January 2013, by S Viswam

  I remember reading in a high-brow British magazine some years ago that a golden rule of literary criticism is that when you review a book you should forget its author and when you write about the author you should forget the book. I don’t know how valid this rule is or even whether it can be universally applicable. However, it has a marginal relevance to my assignment of writing about Mainstream’s celebration of its first 50 years. One cannot write about Mainstream’s golden jubilee without (…)

• On Mainstream’s Golden Jubilee

  3 January 2013, by Girish Mishra

  It is an occasion both of rejoicing and introspection for a person like me who has been associated without interruption with the Mainstream since its birth and during all the years of ups and downs. In fact, it was Nikhil Babu who taught me the skills and intricacies of journalistic writing. His associates, C.N. Chitta Ranjan, D.R. Goyal and Saral Patra, always encouraged me to continue my association.
  To refresh the memory, the Mainstream came into being when India was facing a grim (…)

• Fifty Years of Fearless Journalism

  3 January 2013, by Barun Das Gupta

  Mainstream appeared at a critical moment of independent India’s history. Its first issue was dated September 1, 1962. The eighth issue (dated October 20) hit the newsstands a day before, on the 19th. And on the 20th, began the Chinese aggression in Arunachal Pradesh (then NEFA). At the time, the biggest Left formation in India was the undivided CPI. The Chinese aggression put the party in a moral quandary: was it an ‘aggression’ or a ‘border war’? If it was an aggression then who was the (…)

• Illuminating the Path to Nation-building: The Legacy of Mainstream and Nikhilda

  3 January 2013

  by O.P. Sabherwal
  The rise of Mainstream synchronised with a period of building Indian nationhood, when both the economy and its political propulsion treaded an unchartered path posing baffling questions.
  Those were the later decades of the twentieth century. The Mainstream was an unorthodox offshoot of the Left plank of Indian journalism, its creator and builder, Shri Nikhil Chakravartty, a charismatic personage and communicator with exceptional abilities. Rightly has he been described (…)

• Mainstream: An Enlightening Half-Century

  3 January 2013, by Anees Chishti

  Fifty years is a long period for any forum
to survive and move from strength to strength. Mainstream can look with great pride to its role in the five decades of its existence, particularly because it started publication without big money support and could sustain only with the help of a small group of conscious individuals. The group kept getting larger and larger with each passing month and year, without any worthwhile revenue coming by way of advertisements. The beginnings were almost (…)

• Obama’s Tough Term: Political and Economic Risks Stare at the US

  3 January 2013

  by A Commentator
  Bushmaster guns have made it to the headlines after the recent heartbreaking shooting in a school in the United States. While the debate on gun ownership following the massacre was marked with outrage, what remained unchanged was the fact that ownership of weapons, especially guns, is part of the US heritage and culture and therefore a deep-rooted social issue. The roots of weaponries in the US culture are so deep that apart from gun shops and supershops even the average (…)