Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Tribute: A.K. Damodaran

  14 February 2012

  TRIBUTE
  On the last day of last month verteran diplomat A.K. Damodaran, 90, died in the Capital’s Escorts Hospital. A freedom fighter who was inprisoned for more than 12 months during the ‘Quit India’ struggle in 1942, he taught English at Delhi University before joining the Indian Foreign Service in 1953. He was indeed, as The Indian Express has aptly observed, “one of the brightest and sharpest minds that the foreign policy establishment had seen” and, as his colleague and batch-mate in (…)

• Tribute: K.S. Duggal

  14 February 2012

  TRIBUTE
  Eminent writer Kartar Singh Duggal, 95, passed away in New Delhi’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences (where he was admitted on January 20) in the evening of January 26, 2012, after a brief illness due to old age. He wrote in Punjabi, Urdu, Hindi and English and his works included short stories, novels, poems and plays. A Padma Bhushan awardee (1988), he won the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship (2007) and was a nominated member of the Rajya Sabha (1997-2003). Born on March 1, 1917 (…)

• Constitution, Governor and State Governments

  14 February 2012, by Barun Das Gupta

  Recently on several occasions the West Bengal Governor has permitted himself to make some critcal comments about the State Government publicly. When some college principals were heckled by students belonging to different unions affiliated to different political parties, the Governor demanded strong action by the State Government against the guilty students and said he would have taken ‘other measures’ if he were the head of the administration.
  The next day he again urged strong action (…)

• How Safe Is Kundankulam N-Power Plant?: An Open Letter to Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam

  14 February 2012, by Sailendra Nath Ghosh

  Dear Dr Kalam,
  You are one of the most popular ex-Presidents of the Republic of India, the home of one-sixth of humanity. As such, you enjoy high respect at home and abroad. Your eagerness to ignite people’s minds is universally acclaimed. Your interaction with the student community is a great source of inspiration for all of us.
  You are a world class missile engineer. Your leadership of the defence research and develop-ment projects was excellent. For all these records, you are an (…)

• Jaipal Singh Munda

  14 February 2012, by A K Biswas

  The Commonwealth Games, Delhi 2010, a 12-day extravaganza left an enduring imprint of India’s rising capabilities as a sporting nation. In the meanwhile “the government has made a necessary change in the eligibility criteria for a person getting the India’s highest civilian honour”1 in any field of “human endeavour”. There have been extensive discussions and media campaign for conferment of Bharat Ratna favouring certain sports personalities. Strangely, not once did the Indian media, print (…)

• Right Diagnosis but Need for a Clarification

  14 February 2012

  COMMUNICATION
  The debate initiated by Mr Ather Farouqui in Mainstream through his seminal piece ‘Indo-Pak Relationship and Urdu: Companions in a Paradoxical Syndrome’ (Mainstream Vol L, No 1, December 24, 2011 (Annual 2011) regarding the inactive—rather defunct—literary organisations of the Left is particularly relevant at a time when atavistic forces are hell-bent on strangling any dissenting voice and want to hang whoever writes something that does not conform to their agenda. In such a (…)

• Concealing Battered Realities

  14 February 2012, by Humra Quraishi

  Tell me from where to start off, to begin webbing details to the spread around! Murkier getting each single aspect—whether those scams, or those age rows of ageing Generals or babies lying battered or curtains getting drawn on the very screening of potently relaying documen-taries like Jashn-e-Azadi. Why can’t we see those realities that Sanjay Kak has focused on in his film—Jashn-e-Azadi? Why was its screening called off at a Pune educational institute? Why can’t the rest of India know (…)

• A Prejudiced View of Mahatma Gandhi Sixty Years after his Death

  14 February 2012, by P R Dubhashi

  BOOK REVIEW
  Catching Up with Gandhi by Graham Turner; 2010; pages 344; Rs 350. Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and his Struggle with India by Joseph Lelyveld; Harper Collins Publishers; 2011; pages 452; Rs 699.
  More than sixty years after Mahatma Gandhi has left the scene, two of his biographies have appeared—one by Graham Turner, a British journalist, and the other by Joseph Lelyveld, a journalist in America. What purpose do they serve? Do they tell us anything remarkable to enable a (…)

• Gandhian Democracy: Ignored by the Constitutionalists of India

  14 February 2012, by K G Somasekharan Nair

  “The condition of England at present is pitiable. I pray to God that India may never be in that plight. That which you consider to be the Mother of Parliaments is like a sterile woman and a prostitute. Both these are harsh terms, but exactly fit the case.” —Gandhiji
  The cruel buffooneries of the English Parliament started in the term of King Henry VIII (1509-47) who inaugurated Reformation in England through his immoral life. He decided to divorce his wife, Catherine Aragon, to marry Anne (…)

• Need of the Hour

  31 January 2012, by SC

  Exactly a year ago, on the eve of our sixtysecond Republic Day, it was written in these columns:
  ...if one speaks of the political class, there is hardly any political leader of the Right, Centre or Left worthy of emulation in today’s India. They have all compromised themselves... At the same time the country is inexorably hurtling towards full scale polarisation resulting in political confrontation between the Treasury Benches and Opposition in Parliament where the winter session saw the (…)