Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Hindutva Undermines the Pristine Values of Hinduism

  12 September 2009, by Sailendra Nath Ghosh

  The RSS is deeply in love with the word “Hindu”, shorn of Hinduism’s values. It owes an obligation to the Indian public to clarify if there is any brand of spirituality that is called Hindutva.
  It has recently reiterated that Hindutva is the core of its ideology and rooted in Indian culture and civilisation’s heritage. What exactly are the attributes of this culture as perceived by the RSS? Why are its desired values never spelt out in detail for public edification? If Hindutva is an (…)

• ’Innovation Universities’

  12 September 2009, by Amiya Dev

  The Department of Higher Education, Ministry of Human Resource Development of the Government of India is planning to set up fourteen national universities of ‘world-class’ standard, and has circulated a [draft] concept note to that effect bearing the above title.
  This seems to be revised from an earlier note called ‘Brain Gain’, implying retrieval of some of the better brains that have gone overseas, and thereby rationalising to a degree the still vexed question of ‘brain drain’. The (…)

• The Yashpal Committee Report: A Review

  12 September 2009, by Bhim S. Dahiya

  The key Recommendations of the Yashpal Committee Report is the following:
  A holistic view of knowledge, as advocated above, would demand a regulatory system which treats the entire range of educational institutions in a holistic manner. All of higher education has to be treated as an integrated whole. Professional education cannot be detached from general education. It would be, therefore, imperative that all higher education, including engineering, medicine, agriculture and law, is (…)

• Renewed Threat from China

  12 September 2009, by Barun Das Gupta

  The violation of the India-China border by the Chinese Army near the 22,000 feet high Mount Gya in Jammu and Kashmir at the trijunction of Ladakh, Spiti and Tibet in late July, painting the rocks there in red and writing “China” on them in Cantonese is the latest incident in a series of provocative acts by the Chinese Army against India. In fact, China has been adopting an ominously aggressive anti-India posture for quite some time now.
  Even as Indian and Chinese officials met in New (…)

• Writer in the Time of Terror: The ‘Other’ as a Metaphor

  12 September 2009, by Mohan K. Tikku

  “What happens from here on is no longer a question of ideological oppositions, but a struggle for global reality. There are two global realities, resembling in a nonrepresentational way the old programmatic realities of East and West: the imaginary electronic globe, and the poetic-specific-eco-community.
  “The poet’s job is to short-circuit the imaginary globe.”
  —Romanian writer Andrei Codrescu in
  The Disappearance of the Outside: a Manifesto for Escape
  Like the East (…)

• A National Loss

  9 September 2009, by SC

  Tragedy has struck the Congress and the nation once again. Perhaps the best Chief Minister of the country in terms of dynamism, political acumen and administrative efficiency, the Andhra Pradesh CM, Dr Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy, 60, met with an untimely death when his chopper crashlanded on a hillock in deep forests some 49 nautical miles east of Kurnool in the morning of September 2, 2009 due to inclement weather (although his body as well as the bodies of the other four passengers of the (…)

• For Aung San Suu Kyi

  9 September 2009, by Badri Raina

  In Burma resides a dame,
  Terra Firma is her name;
  They lock her indoors,
  But her pitying smile soars,
  And the Generals are rendered lame.
  Thomas Carlyle, that prophetic voice of the 19th Century, delineated in Heroes And Hero Worship (1841) what he thought were types of world-historical individuals.
  Among them he projected Cromwell as a type of hero whose strength lay in a species of obdurate conviction that had no need of any flamboyant oratorical (…)

• Brain Gain?

  9 September 2009, by Amiya Dev

  The Union Ministry of Education is toying with the idea of setting up a few ‘world-class’ national universities, and to that effect a concept note has been circulated. It is titled ‘Brain Gain’, meaning retrieval of the brain that has gone overseas.
  There was a time when we talked of ‘Brain Drain’ feeling helpless about the migration of some of our better brains. Various reasons were in the air for that phenomenon: lack of adequate research facilities, red tape, neglect of merit and (…)

• Education Then and Education Now: War against Private Universities in Orissa

  9 September 2009, by Sudhakar Panda

  The news that hit the headlines when the Orissa Assembly was in session in July last was the resistance of the Opposition to the Education Bill that sought the approval of the House for the opening of the three new private universities, namely, the Vedanta University, the Sri Sri University and the ICFAI University which would adopt the state-of-the-art technology in imparting education to the students. The State’s initial decision to give away ten thousand acres of land to the Vedanta (…)

• Universalisation of Education: India in a Trap

  9 September 2009, by A K Biswas

  The ordinary meaning of education is knowledge of letters. To teach boys reading, writing and arithmetic is called primary education. A peasant earns his bread honestly. He has ordinary knowledge of the world. He knows fairly well how he should behave towards his parents, his wife, his children and his fellow villagers. He understands and observes the rules of morality. But he cannot write his own name. What do you propose to do by giving him a knowledge of letters? Will you add an inch to (…)