2013

by Raj Kumar Thakur
The very idea that one’s self is independent from the larger socio-political realities is very clearly brought under scrutiny—instead what emerges is connected lives, with water, the chief source of life, being at the core of the movie. Armaan Ali, the chief protagonist of the movie, comes out a champion, a champion who goes beyond the very idea of self, his rebellion a marker of restlessness and dissatisfaction on the part of the common man. The idea of the common (…)

COMMUNICATION
I went through Grover Furr’s reply (Mainstream, April 6, 2013) to my comments. Unfortunately, he meets none of the points raised by me, and repeats his views mechanically without dialec-tical logic and arguments. Everybody is, of course, entitled to one’s views. But when one is arguing a point or points, one should at least try to meet them. Simple and general statements do not help resolving issues. Besides, most unfortunately, Furr has gone personal and has attacked me as (…)

BOOK REVIEW
by Poornima Joshi
Untouchable God by Kancha Ilaiah; Publishers: Samya; pages: 248; Price: Rs 350.
Kancha Ilaiah is not an easy scholar to digest, with his brutal polemic against the Brahminical dominance of the Indian caste order. His latest assault, appropriately titled Untouchable God, is a progression of the unique line of argument he has forwarded since he burst onto the Indian sociological scene with his seminal work Why I am Not a Hindu: A Sudra Critique of Hindutva (…)

Two days after twin blasts near the finish line of the famous Boston marathon shattered the post-9/11 calm in the US killing three persons (including an eight-year-old) and injuring close to 170, 17 of them critically, the powerful explosion of an improvised explosive device (IED) outside the BJP headquarters in Bengaluru’s Malleswaram area at 10.28 am this morning has injured 16 people, among them eight policemen; the IED is reported to have been placed in or around the petrol tank of a (…)

MUSINGS
Narendra Modi seems doing nothing much to his semi-parched and drought hit State; in fact, focusing only on giving speeches to a select crowd of New Delhi. Before I write any further, it seemed more than apparent that his hosts double-checked the invite list and made sure that together with the business movers and shakers, only the Right-wing elements or those fence-sitters be invited. No, the outspoken lot of this Capital city was kept far away from Modi and his men. Why? Just in (…)

According to international economic experts, Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is one of the core issues of Washington’s “Returning to Asia” strategy. However, unlike a number of other economic integration institutions of the Asia-Pacific region, negotiations between the US and prospective BJP member-countries are being conducted in the most vague and secretive manner, without reference to all the “hidden rocks” of the proposed treaty.
Particularly noteworthy in this context is the letter US (…)

From N.C.’s Writings
Early next week, on October 31, the country would be observing the tenth death anniversary of Indira Gandhi who had been cruelly shot down on this very day by her own security guards right inside her residence.
By all accounts it was a ghastly tragedy committ6ed by those who had been embittered by the ‘Operation Bluestar’ at the Golden Temple at Amritsar. The perpetrators of Indira’s assassination owned up the full responsibility for their gory deed which in their (…)

I met Mrs Margaret Thatcher for the first time when I was India’s envoy at London in 1990. At that time she was counting on her achievements, including the triumph in the Cold War. I sent her a congratulatory message for having vanquished the communist ideology. But she said she had even bigger enemies to defeat and mentioned Islam. I have always wondered whether the stirrings in the Islamic world were the doing of Great Britain’s.
Around the same time, I knew that Prime Minister Thatcher (…)

by B.K. Manish
Before the Supreme Court goes for its summer break, it faces a huge dilemma. An appeal challenging the order of the Chhattisgarh High Court in a tribal rights matter is coming up for hearing. In March, the HC dismissed on merit a PIL regarding alleged unconstitutional functioning of the Tribes Advisory Council, a crucial part of the Fifth Schedule mechanism. While the HC praised the effort of the petitioner, it, strangely, overturned a progressive line on the Governor’s (…)

In his book, The End of the American Century, David S. Mason draws the reader’s attention to some shcoking facts of American life. “The United States is the most violent country in the industrialised world. According to reports by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), in 2004 there were 1,367,009 violent crimes in this country. Of these more than 16,000 were homicides. In that year, there was one violent crime every twentythree seconds and one murder every thirtythree minutes. Much of (…)