2020

August 4, 2020
The Secretary of State in the George W. Bush administration Condoleeza Rice once described Belarus as “the last true remaining dictatorship in the heart of Europe.” She held out the assurance that it was “time for change to come to Belarus.” That was during her visit to next-door Lithuania in April 2005. Fifteen years have passed. Rice’s promise is yet to be realised. Is the Trump administration following up?
By all indications, change is in the air in Belarus. For good or (…)

by Erin Aubry Kaplan
Recognizing that Black people deserve dignity isn’t progress.
The new unbridled enthusiasm for the cause of Black lives reminds me of the Dr. Seuss fable “Horton Hears a Who.”
A kindly elephant named Horton becomes aware of a whole planet of creatures called Whos living on a single speck of dust. Horton can hear the Whos perfectly, and accepts them as friends and equals. Horton’s friends, who can’t see or hear the Whos, denounce him as crazy, and a few set out to (…)

by Tejasvini Akhawat
Any kind of occurrence that is violent in nature can invariably be classified as a manifestation of terrorism. The minimalism and lack of austerity associated with the white supremacist terrorism cannot be justified on the grounds and sentiments of anti-Semitic, xenophobia, ultra-nationalism, islamophobia, all of which, to hail history, have in one form or the other served as root causes for formation of major terrorist camps and organisations. If this was the case, (…)

120 years ago, on this very day, Rabindranath Tagore wrote a poem "Deeno Daan". It was about a temple. Here is an English translation by Sandipto Dasgupta of some of the excerpts.

Are you missing the routine: a drab, listless word, lidless stare of monotony? Getting ready, rushing to workplace, doing the day’s job, then the sun lengthening its shadows, you return home, tired, its comforting settings, warmth of your dear ones removing fatigue. Now a new reality has set in. You work from home without any fixed seat or cabin. There is no boundary between office and home; it’s blurred into a single space. You gradually get settled to a different work ambience: (…)

Table of Contents - Mainstream, VOL LVIII No 33, New Delhi, August 1, 2020 Letter to the Readers of Mainstream’s Lockdown Edition 19, Aug 1 | The Editor FSDR — The Ghost of FRDI: Rescuing failed banks at whose cost? | S G Vombatkere Lenin 150: Revisiting Lenin’s Understanding of Democracy in post-revolutionary Russia | Sobhanlal Datta Gupta Hagia Sophia: Heritage of Entire Humanity | Irfan Engineer Pandemic 2020: Toxic Leaders, Selfish Nations And An Orphaned World! | RK MIshra Book Review: (…)

Letter to the Readers, Mainstream, VOL LVIII No 33, New Delhi, August 1, 2020:
Corona crisis: India is confronting its worst health crisis since independence. The Covid-19 tally is rising sharply and inching towards the 15-lakh mark. For the past weeks now, the country has seen a huge rise in the growth of infections and is just ranked below Brazil and the US. The situation is getting serious by the day and the government keeps denying any trace of community transmission. Foreign experts (…)

In 2019, media reported that Government was preparing to table a new legislation, the Financial Sector Development & Regulation (Resolution) Bill (FSDR, hereafter). .
Reportedly FSDR is meant to rescue banks, among other financial sector institutions, from collapse. It replaces the Financial Regulation and Deposit Insurance Bill, 2017 (FRDI hereafter), which was withdrawn in 2018 following public outcry against a “bail-in” provision, which small depositors did not trust. (…)

The literature on Lenin spanning the Cold War as well as the post-Cold War era has been broadly characterized by two rather opposite viewpoints: deification or demonization of this iconic figure of the twentieth century.

by Irfan Engineer
The re-conversion of Hagia Sophia from a patriarchal cathedral built by Justinian I in 537 CE to Hagia Sophia Grand Mosque in 1453 after the conquest of Constantinople by Sultan Mehmet II and into a museum of the same name by Kemal Ataturk in 1934 and again into a mosque of the same name on 24th July 2020 has thrown up quite a controversy. The reconversion of the Christian-Muslim monument in 21st Century that was a museum for nearly a century signifies the global rise and (…)