2015

Prof K.M. Shrivastava, seniormost Professor at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC), New Delhi, collapsed suddenly on August 28 night at the Nizamuddin Railway Station, New Delhi. He was 63. He had just returned to Delhi from the IIMC-Jammu and reached Nizamuddin Railway Station from the Delhi Airport to board a train for Bhopal. Prof Shrivastava was with a former student, who had come to drop him at the station, when he collapsed. Prof Shrivastava was rushed to the All India (…)

EDITORIAL
While the newspapers—and the electronic media in particular—are full of detailed accounts of the sordid murder of Sheena Bora magnifying the role of Indira Mukerjea behind the entire episode, the news of the nationwide strike called by 10 central trade union organisations, that disrupted normal life in different parts of the country yesterday, could find space only in the inside pages of major newspapers claiming to be national dailies. This only betrays the skewed priorities of (…)

The irrational thinking and doing is mostly the result of desperation and loss of balance of mind. People fall a victim to it on account of three main reasons: i) ignorance and fundamentalism which is nothing but orthodoxy combined with fan-aticism; ii) the uncontrolled passions released by the inherent enemies of Man, namely, lust, anger, greed, fear, egoism, jealousy and possessive love; and iii) insecure and uncertain conditions of life.
Ignorance may be curbed by proper education (…)

by Arun Srivastava
The following article was sent sometime ago but could not be used earlier due to unavoidable reasons.
It is now being belatedly published as its contents retain considerable relevance.
After 68 years of independence any call from senior Muslim clergy to celebrate the national day with a spirit of patriotism would undou-btedly give rise to some amount of anxiety. The leading Islamic seminary, Darul Uloom, Deoband, has asked Muslims to put up the national flag on their (…)

by S.N. Sahu
The accelerated pace of globalisation, at the heart of which remain neoliberal policies, has resulted in higher levels of inequalities causing frustration and dejection among vast masses of ordinary peoples across several countries.
Proliferation of Literature on Inequality at Global Level
Internationally acclaimed thinkers and economists have published monumental books on inequality depicting the widening gulf between the common people and a small section of the rich and (…)

My reading is that Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has had a second thought on the talks with India after fixing the meeting of Chief Security Advisors of the two countries. Otherwise, he would have intervened to clear the air and said that when he met Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Ufa, Russia, they had agreed to confine their talks to tackle terrorism which was bleeding the two countries. It is possible that the Army pulled the rug out from under Nawaz Sharif’s feet. It is hard to buy this (…)

From N.C.’s Writings
The recent incident in Islamabad, when a member of the Indian diplomatic mission, Rajesh Mittal, was brutally assaulted by Pakistani intelligence—violating the norms of the Vienna Convention on diplomatic rights and immunities—has touched off countrywide angry protests. This is nothing surprising, particularly when Indo-Pak relations continue to be fragile, and Pakistan’s help to the secessionist elements in the Kashmir Valley is undeniable.
This provocative action (…)

The following is the latest article written by Kobad Ghandy, the noted Marxist-Maoist thinker, now lodged in Tihar Jail 3, last month and sent to us for publication in Mainstream.
The lives of the superstars, which preoccupy our media, is not the real India. It is the Black (market) India used to seduce the middle classes into a make-believe world, living the fantasy of an unreal hope. Crumbs and discards from the super-rich table, lapped up by a gullible section, plus the mythical glory (…)

by Rakesh Agrawal
More than 700 existing, proposed and under construction dams and hydro-electricity projects (HEPs) in Uttarakhand had not only put its highly sensitive Himalayan eco-zone into danger by submerging thousands of hectares of forests and agricultural land, devastating its fragile mountains, creating landslides and inducing earthquakes as massive amount of water is stored in their reservoirs, these have also uprooted thousands of people from their homes as they have to leave (…)

“A good world needs knowledge, kindness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men’—Bertrand Russell
The consternation witnessed around the release of religious figures in Census 2011 has rather overshadowed an interesting fact which has emerged through this mammoth exercise. It tells us that India has 2.87 million people who have no faith in any religion, which is around 0.24 per (…)