Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Stimulating Exercise unfolding Socialist Future

  22 June 2009, by K S Subramanian

  Book Review
  Workers Politics, the Ethics of Socialism by William Ash; Bread Books, Coventry, UK; 2007; pp. 340.
  This is a remarkable book by a remarkable author! William Ash is an acclaimed novelist, script editor, journalist and writer, decorated war hero, leading trade unionist and thinker! The publication of the book, a British reprint of an earlier book published in India in 1998 with a different title, coincided with the 90th birthday of the distinguished author. The book is a (…)

• Lest We Forget

  22 June 2009

  Several noted personalities, some of them friends and associates of Mainstream, have left us in the last few months. We pay our sincere, though belated, homage to their abiding memory.
  On November 9, 2008 passed away in New Delhi Mahendra Acharya, 90, who functioned as the CPI Parliamentary Party’s Office Secretary till 1996. A totally unassuming dedicated revolutionary, he joined the party in the central office staff when P.C. Joshi was its dynamic General Secretary. He worked in the (…)

• Substantive and Meaningful

  13 June 2009, by SC

  The last seven days have been witness to two striking events.
  President Barack Obama‘s historic and landmark speech in Cairo on June 4 through which he sought to reach out to the Islamic world was indeed refreshingly new from the side of the United States and marked, at least in the sphere of rhetoric and at the conceptual level, a radical departure from George W. Bush’s prenicious course in both Iraq and Afghanistan. The contentious issues he dwelt in his speech included the (…)

• Cairo, Islamabad, Delhi And Washington D.C.: Unitive Quantrangle through Obama Incarnation

  13 June 2009, by V R Krishna Iyer

  The world is never static. It is ever dynamic. Obama is the new avatar for transformation of a new unitive world order inspired by a spiritual-material comity of humanity rid of the pathology of theological obscurantism and terrorist inhumanity. Not nuclear holocaust nor belligerent supremacy but a new beginning inaugurated by Obama in his historic appeal in Cairo for global peace and friendship between Asia and America led by Obama who is no longer a person but an institution, an ideology (…)

• Genocide of Sri Lankan Tamils

  13 June 2009, by Era Sezhiyan

  Era Sezhiyan, a former Member of Parliament, has brought to light the documents relating to India’s co-sponsoring and supporting the Sri Lankan resolution to the UN Human Rights Council on May 27, 2009, commending the acts of the Sri Lanka. Below is given a summary of the relevant portions of his appeal and the note to Members of Parliament and the scanned copies of the Human Rights Council’s documents relating to India being a co-sponsor and voting in support of the Resolution of Sri Lanka. (…)

• Tribute: Kamala Suraiya - Femme Fatale of Indian Literature

  13 June 2009, by N A Karim

  With the death of Kamala Suraiya at Pune at the age of seventyfive, Indian literature has lost a rare and remarkable writer of multi-linguistic, multi-personal and multi-literary identities and sensibilities. As a strong self-willed child she grew up in Malabar and Calcutta jealously guarding her rights and furiously defending her various identities, particularly the feminine identity, in the face of attacks from genteel society. She has never been apologetic about any one of them. See how (…)

• Tribute to Kamala Das: Love in the Time of Pain

  13 June 2009, by T J S George

  As a writer who combined originality with daring, Kamala Das had no equal in Indian literature. The originality established her as a poet in her teens. The daring made her an international sensation, making waves from Canada to Japan.
  Man-woman relationship was her theme. She wrote about it with no sense of taboos—a quality that is applauded as ‘modern’ in men. Women modernists usually approach the theme from a feminist angle, seeing man as an adversary, even enemy.
  Kamala (…)

• Reflections on the Election Results and Tasks Ahead

  13 June 2009, by Sailendra Nath Ghosh

  Sonia Gandhi, aided by her son Rahul, has shown her mastery over electoral politics. Of course, UPA’s victory has been facilitated by the follies and infighting within BJP; the latter’s failure to understand that the religious community called the Hindus are so secular and so permeated with the “Sarva dharma samabhava” ideas that they will no longer become a solid vote bank for communal politics; its failure to drop Varun Gandhi as its candidate after his infamous “hate speech”; its failure (…)

• A Mix of Relief and Disappointment

  13 June 2009, by Shree Shankar Sharan

  The Parliament elections have both been a relief and a disappointment A relief because it has ensured continuity and stability to a party that needs at least two terms to show results and distribute to the people the fruits of its policy. Also a relief because the voter gave the party he supported sufficient majority to follow its policy unhindered by arm-twisting by small parties that extracted to the full their pound of flesh for providing a majority cushion to the ruling party. In fact (…)

• Outcome of General Election 2009

  13 June 2009, by P R Dubhashi

  The Unexpected Results
  The results of the general election for the fifteenth Lok Sabha belied all expectations and predictions. Most of the exit polls predicted that the Congress would emerge as the largest party but would be nowhere near an absolute majority —not even the UPA, that is, Congress + Trinamul Congress + NCP + DMK. The best hope of the Congress was to get 160 to 170 seats. In actual fact it crossed, for the first time since 1991, the two hundred mark and bagged 206 seats. The (…)