August 2009

Sudeep Ray 58, a Marxist activist who happened to be the West Bengal State Committee member of the Party for Democratic Socialism (PDS) headed by former CPM MP Saifuddin Chowdhury, passed away in Kolkata on July 3 night after being involved in a road accident.
Sudeep was a leader of the bank employees movement in West Bengal and was in the CPI for several years having been active in the students’ movement when one came in touch with him and forged a bond of fraternal intimacy. He like (…)

While film star Emraan Hashmi has openly come out conveying the fact that his being a Muslim has caused difficulties for him to purchase a flat in Mumbai and attributed this to the alleged anti-Muslim bias on the part of the cooperative society involved, another film star Shabana Azmi has disclosed similar problems she and her husband, celebrated lyricist Javed Akhtar, faced while hunting for a flat in the same metropolis—and ace film director Mahesh Bhatt has confirmed the prevalence of the (…)

Carried away by the effect of the Oscared Slum Dog Millionaire (SDM) and tend to take its leitmotif for something eternal? Then Rolland Barthes was so very right. Bourgeoising myth redefines everything for a specific purpose and metamorphoses the mundane into extramundane, socio-cultural into natural, and temporal into eternal. Stretching a bit further, if it is a popular myth of our times, then the fascinating categories, the mythological icons, are the slum, the dog, and the millionaire. (…)

The article “Sri Lanka: Rajapaksa’s ‘Final Resolution’” by M.K. Bhadrakumar (Mainstream, July 28, 2009) is an eye-opener for those who think that the only reason for the recent mass carnage on Tamils was the vanquished LTTE.
As Bhadrakumar rightly put it, the region in the Indian Ocean has become a theatre for big-power rivalry.
The present government of President Rajapaksa is the first to fully embrace the Sinhalese Buddhist ideology, suggesting that there is (…)

The Congress is a bourgeois-democratic party. This perception is the spine of applied communist ideology in India. Since its commencement, all strategies and tactics adopted by the communist movement to make India red has been engineered by this immutable dogmatism. Hence the Communists dedicated their whole potency to put an end to the monopoly of the Congress in the freedom struggle and the administration thereafter. In partial dispensation of this historical mission, they propped up the (…)

COMMUNICATION
The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIA) with Nandan Nilekani at its head is set to provide a unique number to all Indian citizens by 2011, at a cost estimated at Rs 150,000 crores, with an initial budgeted outlay of Rs 100 crores for the current year. Obtaining the UI Number is said to be not mandatory. Thus people who would want the UI Number but to whom there is little access because of living in remote areas, and people who are absent from their home when the (…)

In human history, from the advent of advanced agrarian communities till the last quarter of the nineteenth century, slavery has been a part and parcel of most, if not all, human societies, and a most ubiquitous institution, with, of course, variations in the scale and intensity of exploitation. There have existed with various other forms of dependency such as villeinage, debt-bondage, pawnship but it was in slavery, that the worst forms of human exploitation and misery, the most blatant (…)

This article is based on the author’s weeklong trip to and discussions in Pakistan last month. It is being published as a point of view.
The worst fears of some of us have now been confirmed. Pakistani society, politicians and media have always been talking about the involvement of Indian intelligence agency RAW in fomenting trouble inside Pakistan. First it was in Sindh, particularly in Karachi. Now people say there is no doubt about Indian involvement in Balochistan and some say that the (…)

An Indian cultural delegation got unwittingly caught up in the recent turmoil in Beijing. As the Army cracked down, the delegation had to be hurriedly evacuated. Talking to the Indian press, playwright Vijay Tendulkar and novelist U.R. Anantamurthy, the two most prominent members of the delegation, described the Tienanmen incident as worse than Jallianwala Bagh. One can hardly disagree.
The butchery beggars description and was, in the initial stages, seen alive on television (…)

The editor deserves compliments for the sincere remembrance of the Tiananmen massacre in the June 6, 2009 issue of Mainstream. Indignation and outrage felt by both S.C. and N.C. twenty years ago still touch the heart. This is in such sharp contrast with the ‘line’ of a section of the so-called Left in this country. Your effort have inspired the writer to fish out a copy of an after-edit, published by the Nagpur Times (July 17, 1989). I hope you will be able to print it (after correcting some (…)