Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

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  Audio: Nathalie Etoke - The Quarantine Tapes 176

  10 April 2021

  Nathalie Etoke wrote ‘Melancholia Africana: The Indispensable Overcoming of the Black Condition’ winning her the Caribbean Philosophy Assocn Frantz Fanon Prize

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  Gary Kasparov vs Anatoly Karpov - Chess Rivals and the Soviet Sport Bureaucracy - A documentary on Russian Chess Under Late Socialism

  10 April 2021

  https://youtu.be/LD50U9bs_u4

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  Table of Contents, Mainstream, Apr 3, 2021

  2 April 2021

  * W. Bengal Polls: Mockery of Democracy in Nandigram | Barun Das Gupta
  * Poll vault: Rambling notes | Sankar Ray
  * Covid-19 Pandemic and Lockdown - One year on | Arun Kumar
  * Protect Women’s Rights - Don’t let the Istanbul Convention die!
  * Rosebud XX1 | a sketch by Sukhvinder Shahi

• Letter to the Readers - Mainstream, April 3, 2021

  2 April 2021

  Letter to the Readers, Mainstream, April 3, 2021
  We feel concerned at the disturbing incident of public thrashing of a BJP MLA from Punjab. It is appropriate that in Congress party Ruled Punjab the Chief Minister has ordered stringent action against the perpetrators. The farmers’ unions from Punjab must now also come out publicly and take distance from such mob justice. As a state ruled by the most prominent social-democratic opposition party and also a place from where the most formidable (…)

• Mockery of Democracy | Barun Das Gupta

  2 April 2021, by Barun Das Gupta

  The widespread violence that was witnessed on Thursday, April 1, 2021, the polling day, at the Nandigram constituency, from which Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee is contesting, was anticipated and preventable. Neither the Election Commission nor the Union Home Ministry under which the Central paramilitary forces are, can escape responsibility for it. Mamata was virtually kept detained for over two hours at the Boyal polling booth which she had gone to visit on receipt of reports that the TMC (…)

• Poll vault: Rambling notes | Sankar Ray

  2 April 2021, by Sankar Ray

  A white coloured Mahindra XUV500 jeep (AS 10B 1022), owned by the Bharatiya Janata Party candidate from Patharkandi in Karimganj district in Assam was caught red-handed by people around for carrying electronic voting machines (EVM). This makes independent and politically unattached scribes like us deeply suspicious of the role of the Election Commission of India without the collusive role of whose higher-ups (with the ruling BJP to rig the elections) couldn’t happen. This highly criminal (…)

• Covid-19 Pandemic and Lockdown - One year on: An Assessment | Arun Kumar

  2 April 2021, by Arun Kumar

  March 2021 marks one year of the declaration of COVID 19 as a pandemic by the WHO. And, on March 25 India went into a severe lockdown after a one day Janata curfew on March 22. The cases rose alarmingly till the middle of September 2020 and then mysteriously went down only to rise steeply in some States since February 2021. On March 25, 2020 the number of new cases were 121 and deaths were 2. Now there are more than 40,000 cases daily and 200 deaths. The contrast in the picture between March (…)

• ‘India That is Bharat.’ Are We Sure? | TJS George

  2 April 2021, by T J S George

  When religion is linked with patriotism, it can drive people to extremes. Not long ago an Islamist group in Somalia, the Al Shabaad, banned samosas in the country. The reasoning was that the triangular shape of the samosa was a trick to spread the trinity concept of Christianity.
  We haven’t reached that level of silliness, but we have developed our own brand of extremism. Recently prominent citizens who wrote a letter to the Prime Minister about lynchings had an FIR filed against (…)

• Mamata Banerjee’s call for Opposition Unity - Raises more questions than it answers | P S Jayaramu

  2 April 2021, by P S Jayaramu

  by P S Jayaramu *
  In the midst of the ongoing assembly elections in West Bengal. Chief Minister Ms Mamata Banerjee has addressed a letter to senior Opposition leaders like Sharad Pawar, Arvind Kejriwal and the interim president of the Congress Party Smt. Sonia Gandhi, urging them to join hands for a united and effective struggle against what she calls BJP’s ‘assault’ on democracy and the Constitution. The letter is also addressed to M.K. Stalin, Uddhav Thackeray, Tejaswi Yadav and Navin (…)

• A Note on Politics in West Bengal | Arup Kumar Sen

  2 April 2021, by Arup Kumar Sen

  The term ‘politics’ does not carry any single meaning. The following observations enrich our understanding of politics:
  “The people at large exist in an oblique relationship to politics, watching over and asking questions of the political class...the people are indeed reluctant political beings who take to the streets once in a while and when absolutely cornered. Otherwise, people go about the business of life and living, and sometimes voting. But this does not mean that people are (…)