2020

TRIBUTE
Shri. T.N. Chaturvedi, was a Governor of another kind. I had a personal experience of witnessing how he conducted the business of a Governor. It was exemplary. He kept a distance from both bureaucracy and civil society but was always there as an arbiter of justice.
I had three close encounters with him as a citizen of Bangalore during his governorship. The first revealed both his magnanimity and his consciousness of what can be called national events, national initiatives. In (…)

by Bhartendu Kumar Singh
When the first Republic Day was celebrated in 1950, people just poured out here, there, and everywhere on the Delhi roads to catch a glimpse of their first President as he drove from the majestic Rashtrapati Bhavan towards the then Irwin (now National) Stadium, venue of India’s first Republic Day parade. However, as years have passed by, there is an artificial distance between the Republic and its people, best evident in the contemporary Republic Day celebrations. (…)

MUSINGS
Shouldn’t all possible Commissions for Women and also those for the Human Rights sit up and take note of the fact that in these very recent protests against the CAA and NRC and NPR, the police force has been not just blatantly brute whilst dealing with the protestors but there are also news reports that confirm the fact that policemen have kicked and punched women in the abdomen, have pulled off veils and burqas and hijabs and also touched breasts of the women protestors! Even (…)

BOOK REVIEW
by Bharti Chhibber
Arab Spring: Not Just A Mirage by Nilofar Suhrawardy; New Delhi: Gaurav Book Centre; 2019; pp. 167; Rs 825.
It has been nine years since the world witnessed one of the largest wave of democracy of the 21st Century in the form of Arab Spring. There were pro-democracy protests and uprisings against the authoritarian rules across the Middle East and North Africa starting from 2010 with the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia. It was followed by uprisings in Egypt, (…)

From N.C.’s Writings
Every year we dutifully go through the ritual of offering homage to Gandhiji on the day of his martyrdom.
We shall once again be witnessing the ceremony on January 30 to be conducted as per protocol—early morning prayer at Rajghat, singing of bhajans and hymns, a round of spinning and then during the course of the day, meetings and seminars and a special programme on Doordarshan to remind us of the Father of the Nation. VVIPs encircled by gun-totting security guards (…)

The following is the transcreation of Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s “We Shall See” by Badri Raina.
Inevitable that we shall see
Dawn of the promised day,
When pinnacles of tyranny
Will come to be blown away
Like bales of cotton loosely held,
When the ground shall shudder underneath
The gumption of empowered feet,
And bang on the swollen head
Lightning strike with telling heat;
When despot-icons shall be removed
From God’s outraged earthly bed,
And taintless victims of crushing (…)

TRIBUTE
by Syeda Hameed
The following lines from Allama Iqbal express what Devi Prasad Tripathi means today to all his friends and admirers.
Marney waley marte hain lekin fana hotey nahin
Woh haqeeqat mein kabhi humse juda hotey nahin
Marne salon ki jabeen raushan hai iss zulmaat mein
Jis tarah tarey chamaktey hain andheri raat mein
The man was known to the world as DPT. He was universally loved, he never gave up, he never said no. Symbol of hope, where will we find another one (…)

On January 30 this year falls the seventysecond anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi’s martyrdom. We pay our homage to the Father of the Nation on this occasion by reproducing some paragraphs from Jawaharlal Nehru’s Foreword to D.G. Tendulkar’s Mahatma (written in Pahalgam, Kashmir, June 30, 1954, and carried in Jawaharlal Nehru: An Anthology edited by S. Gopal).
by Jawaharlal Nehru
The long story of humanity can be considered from many points of view; it is a story of the advance and growth of (…)

by P.B. Sawant
Under our Constitution, we have accepted parliamentary democracy as our political system. It means and implies that the executive/ministry consists of members of the legislature, that is, the Assembly in the case of the State, and they are responsible to the Assembly. Per force, it means that the Assembly, of which they are members, has to be duly constituted as per the Constitution, by swearing in the elected members, and the elected members electing the Speaker to conduct (…)

by Ashok Celly
Gandhi was the inventor of the world’s most original non-violent revolution called Satyagraha. He thought it would prove India’s most effective weapon in her fight for freedom against the British. And it did. The British left India in 1947. Gandhi was also a great crusader against untouchability (and later the caste system). He thought it was a great social evil and a blight on India’s culture. And he did his utmost to root out this evil but he didn’t use very special, and (…)