Mainstream Weekly

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• From Rajghat, Delhi to Geneva: Yearlong Gandhian March for Justice and Peace

  20 October 2019, by Bharat Dogra

  From October 2 to October 4 there was a very colourful gathering of people from several nations in Delhi. This was part of the inauguration and preparation for a global peace initiative in the form of a march from Delhi to Geneva. This march, which started on October 4, will continue for almost a year and will end in Geneva on September 26, 2020, World Peace Day. While the core group of marchers consists of 50 women and men from various parts of world, supporting meetings and initiatives (…)

• There is a Word No Longer Heard

  20 October 2019, by Badri Raina

  There is a word no longer heard,
  No longer in the human mind;
  As life moves its epistemes,
  Words get left behind.
  There is comfort, there is fun,
  Skill, show, applause;
  But lack of meat at the heart of these,
  Like the thinnest gauze.
  The next distraction ever at hand,
  No feeling has the heft to sink
  Into the cauldron of being,
  Now slave to vanishings.
  As people disappear from life,
  Replaced by digital wonders,
  There is no depth in transgressions,
  Only fanciful (…)

• Square

  20 October 2019

  Life seems to be a straight line
  endlessly elongating;
  a time comes when it bends,
  shaping into a big square.
  The square gets small, smaller;
  you shuffle within its confines.
  The sensory world closes in,
  marking your appointed place.
  But mind breaks the barriers,
  soaring over land, sea, desert,
  conjuring up colours of life,
  the grandeur of its immensity.
  A.K. Das

• 

  Scenario in India and Beyond

  13 October 2019

  POLITICAL NOTEBOOK
  While one positive development in the overall national political scenario is the belated decision of the Bihar Police to close the sedition case against 49 leading intellectuals and film personalities for signing an open letter to PM Narendra Modi over the rising incidents of mob lynching and intolerance, the Vijayadashami Day speech of RSS sarsanghchalak Mohan Bhagwat has highlighted the inflexible stand of the ideological guru of the Sangh Parivar on such a major issue (…)

• JP: Some Reflections

  13 October 2019, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  From N.C.’s Writings
  [by] Analyst
  On the occasion of Jayaprakash Narayan’s 117th birth anniversary on October 11, 2019 we are carrying the following piece written by N.C. under the pseudonym ‘Analyst’ after JP passed away on October 8, 1979.
  Jayaprakash Narayan has carried with him fulsome tributes from all political circles—his adherents and admirers, his adversaries and detractors. A life of ups and downs of heroic times and despairing moments. Living beyond the Psalmist’s assigned (…)

• Why Malayalam Outclasses Hindi

  13 October 2019, by T J S George

  IMPRESSIONS
  I am convinced that Malayalam should be declared the national language of India. Of the many reasons, consider just two. It is a universal language spoken all over the globe and in outer space; who doesn’t know that when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, he was welcomed by a Malayali chaiwallah. Secondly, it is the only language in history that has the same spelling left to right and right to left.
  Except for this double uniqueness of Malayalam, Salman Soz, the rising star (…)

• Holding Kashmir to Ransom

  13 October 2019

  by M.A. Sofi
  Far from the ruse of development or ‘main-streaming’ Kashmir as the stated purpose behind repealing Article 370, all that it is meant and intended to achieve is to advance an agenda that seeks to promote the persona of Modi and his minions as ‘muscular, decisive (?)’ politicians. And if that is achieved at the risk of humiliation and immiseration of the Kashmiri society, that is even better and, in fact, part of the grand design! As Pratap Bhanu Mehta evocatively remarks in a (…)

• Playing Diaspora Diplomacy: Profits and Pitfalls

  13 October 2019

  by L.K. Sharma
  Howdy, Modi, the Houston extravaganza, was part of the Prime Minister’s mission to involve the Hindu diaspora in India’s domestic politics. This time, he went further by inducting himself into America’s domestic politics. Modi sought to influence the political judgment of Am-Indians, calling them his adopted “family”! A very large section of Am-Indians feels enthused by his rhetoric of Hindutva; so the Indian Prime Minister thought he could modify their political (…)

• 

  Women of the World Stand with Kashmir, Stand with the Women of Kashmir

  13 October 2019

  The following is a statement of solidarity with the women of Kashmir issued by women of all countries including India as well as national and international women’s organisations.
  On August 30, 2019, the United Nations’ International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances, Parveena Ahangar, mother of Javaid, a 16-year old who was ‘disappeared’ by the paramilitary forces in Kashmir in 1990, mourned again. “Every year, the families of APDP (Association of Parents of Disappeared (…)

• Remembering Vidyasagar on his 200th Birthday

  13 October 2019

  by Jayanta Kumar Ghosal
  Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar (Bandopadhyay), the doyen or our 19th Century Bengali Renaissance, was born in a dark period of the early 19th Century, on September 26, 1820, in a remote village of Medinipur district, 84 kms away from Calcutta. The inhabitants of the village were poor and illiterate and full of orthodoxy and age-old customs and did not get modern education. Ruthless zamindars and bigoted priests ruled the village society. A deeproted belief in a number of (…)