2019

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 (…)

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

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 (…)

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 (…)

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 (…)

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 (…)

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 (…)

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 (…)

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 (…)

by D.M. Diwakar
I
Context
The Census of India 2011 suggests that about 30 per cent of the population is below 15 years. The United Nations Population Division’s report projection suggests that the youth population in India will be 34.46 per cent by 2020 and India will be the youngest country of the world with an average age of 29 years. By 2030 India will have the largest number of working population (962 million) in the world. In order to impart appropriate skills for lives and (…)