2020

[Sept 26, 1890, is 200th birth anniversary of Iswarchandra Vidyasagar]
by Pabitra Kumar Sarkar
On March 2001, a group of Talibani terrorists blasted the majestic Buddhist statue at Bamian valley in Afganistan by charging powerful dynamite. It was one of the tallest such statues in the world. The historic statue which was 1500 hundred years old, was a unique artifice. Bamian is a heritage site of the UNESCO.
The statue was chiselled out on the hill surface. But this sort of sculptural (…)

"B N Yugandhar whom I knew-a few sweet recollections on the occasion of his first death anniversary (13.09.20)."
This is a humble tribute to the memory of late B N Yugandhar (IAS RR AP Cadre 1962) with whom I had spent some of my most productive and memorable years in civil service (notably 90s and beyond till he breathed his last on 13.09.19). I was Secretary, Board for Industrial and Financial Reconstruction (BIFR) in the rank and pay of an Addl. Secy. to Govt. of India from (…)

Dhawan Rajneesh, Amritsar 1919 (Hindi Novel), 2019, Delhi, Rajpal & Sons, 192 pages
As per the flap introduction, the writer of this novel Rajneesh Dhawan is teaching English at the University of Simon Fraser Valley in Canada. He is originally from Amritsar and few of his plays have been staged in Canada. He also wrote scripts and dialogues of few door darshan serials.
The novel is narrated in first person as the novelist creates a character Kuru for this purpose. In the very (…)

Jatindra Nath Das was a very courageous and determined freedom fighter who accepted the most painful sufferings with a smiling face for the ideal of freedom of India. He achieved martyrdom at the age of only 25 on September 13, 1929 in Lahore jail. He was a brilliant student but chose to dedicate his life to freedom movement. While doing his BA he was arrested and sent to Mymensing Jail. Here he as well as other arrested freedom fighter prisoners were treated very badly. Even at this very (…)

Another Unknown Person Ringing at My Door: A statement from Svetlana Alexievich, Nobel Laureate and Chair of Belarusian PEN
September 9, 2020
There is no one left of my friends and associates in the opposition’s Coordination Council. They are all in prison, or they have been thrown out of the country. The last, Maksim Znak, was taken today.
First they seized our country, and now they are seizing the best of us. But hundreds of others will come and fill the places of those who have (…)

by Ariel Dorfman
September. 4, 2020
Fifty years ago today, on the night of Sept. 4, 1970, I was dancing, along with a multitude of others, in the streets of Santiago de Chile. We were celebrating the election of Salvador Allende, the first democratically elected socialist leader in the world.
President Allende’s victory had historical significance beyond Chile. Before then, political revolutions had been violent, imposed by force of arms. Allende and his left-wing coalition used (…)

The Yellow River is a key factor in this environmental drama, and there is little doubt that as with the Indus, Brahmaputra, or Mekong, its pasts and futures hold mysteries humans can barely master. One wishes for more explicit comparisons with other societies and the Song dynasty’s time and ours. If modernity has longer, older roots, do we rethink the environmental bounds of our own age?

by Svenja Tidau, Daniela Torres Dia, Stuart Jenkins
August 11, 2020
Many nocturnal animal species use light from the moon and stars to migrate at night in search of food, shelter or mates. But in our recent study we uncovered how artificial light is disrupting these nightly migrations.
Electric lighting is transforming our world. Around 80% of the global population now lives in places where night skies are polluted with artificial light. A third of humanity can no longer see the Milky (…)

Table of Contents - Mainstream, VOL LVIII No 38, New Delhi, September 5, 2020 Letter to the Readers - Mainstream September 5, 2020| The Editor India Beckons Congress | Ashok Celly A non-Gandhian President for the Congress Party: Need of the Hour | P. S. Jayaramu Delhi Diary | Ather Farruqui Privatizing the Pandemic | Arindam Roy Aggressive Privatization May Accentuate Exclusion Further | D. M. Diwakar Implications of National Education Policy 2020 on (…)

India is in the throes of major economic crisis: According to official data released by the National Statistics Office (NSO) on August 31, India’s gross domestic product (GDP) contracted 23.9 per cent in the April-June quarter of 2020-21 from that in the same quarter last financial year. The Chief Economist of the World Bank has further confirmed this while releasing its own graph on G20 nations showing the Indian Economy’s performance at -25.6 in Quarter 2 of 2020 — the worst among all G20 (…)