2021

Delhi; 3rd May 2021
Pyres are lit, so numerous That the horizon is smudged grey With the smoke of bodies We did cremate; Still they debate, To give or not to give; Who shall live?
The crematorium’s iron melts; But not the heart of men in power Who even in this hour Play politics over governance While the gasping, await deliverance.
They divided us in the name of religion, They called us names, And around these games Only the people died, Pleading for oxygen, hospital beds And in the (…)

by KS Subramanian
Intertwined Lives: PN Haksar and Indira Gandhi by Jairam Ramesh Simon & Schuster, India, 2018, pp.518, Price Rs. 799
This remarkable book is about Parmeshwar Narain Haksar arguably India’s most influential and powerful civil servant under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.
Haksar was Indira Gandhi’s alter ego during her period of glory. The eminent administrator and diplomat, was educated in Allahabad and London; and was called to the Bar from Lincoln ‘s Inn. He (…)

THE CRITIQUE OF WORK IN MODERN FRENCH THOUGHT: From Charles Fourier to Guy Debord by Alastair Hemmens
Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2019. 226 pp. £44.99 pb Hardcover ISBN 978-3-030-12585-1 Softcover ISBN 978-3-030-12588-2 eBook ISBN 978-3-030-12586-8 DOI 10.1007/978-3-030-12586-8
Reviewed by Ross Sparkes
Under capitalism, life is work and work is life. To imagine a world beyond it is sheer blasphemy. Yet, a growing number of titles over the past decade have begun to do just that. They (…)

Dmitrov (Moscow province)
21 December, 1920
Respected Vladimir Illich,
An announcement has been placed in Izvestiia and in Pravda which makes known the decision of the Soviet government to seize as hostages SRs [Social Revolutionary party members] from the Savinkov groups, White Guards of the nationalist and tactical center, and [Pyotr] Wrangel officers; and, in case of an [assassination] attempt on the leaders of the soviets, to “mercilessly exterminate” these hostages.
Is there (…)

* Chamoli and Climate Change | SG Vombatkere
* The Covid Moment and the Civilisational Crisis | Manoranjan Mohanty
* LDF and Kerala elections 2021 | P Radhakrishnan
* Assam Assembly Election 2021: on the Verge of a Political Quandary | Nurul Hassan
* Political violence may intensify after the West Bengal Assembly Election 2021 | Tarun Kumar Basu
* AITUC Zindabad | Chittoprasad

Letter to the Readers, Mainstream, May 1, 2021
A grim future stares at India at it battles against a ferocious second wave of Covid-19. A staggering 402,110 new cases of Covid-19 have been reported for April 30. Official data on total number of infections in the country is fast approaching 20 million.
Health facilities in different parts of the country are caught in a storm and a shortage of oxygen, of beds and personnel who are trained to handle a large-scale medical emergency, and (…)

by Kingshuk Sarkar*
As Covid pandemic intensifies, possibility of reverse distress migration of informal workers has again become an imminent apprehension. The question is whether we can avoid tragic circumstances this time around. A draft national policy on migrant workers is in public domain and is being discussed. The basic issue of entitlement of a worker needs to be addressed rather than the migrant identity alone.
The second wave of Covid is hitting the country hard with number of (…)

by Harihar Swarup
(India Press Agency, April 24, 2021) As a preventive measure against the Covid 19 in India, the Indian government imposed a nationwide 21-day lockdown on March 23, 2020, restricting the movement of its entire population of 1.38 billion. The nationwide lockdown continued until May 3, after which it was extended with conditional relaxations until May 31. The economy slowly started reverting with Unlock 1.0 being announced on June 1. Today, almost a year later, COVID-19 (…)

Chamoli
April 23, 2021. Uttarakhand’s Chamoli District suffered flash flood yet again. The previous one was on February 7, 2021. Both took sudden and huge toll of human and animal life and economic loss, including destroying infrastructure of dams and roads. Both occurred because of avalanches possibly triggered by glacier-dam burst.
This writer argues that the avalanches were both the cause and the effect of global warming (GW). Cause: The loss of natural forest cover through (…)

April 29, 2021
Ex-CIA officer Bruce Riedel at Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, whose familiarity with Afghanistan is never in doubt, has held a looking glass to figure out the future course of events even as the US troop withdrawal commences.
History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. Riedel sees in the haziness old familiar shapes appearing — the erstwhile Northern Alliance warlords. And he invokes the fate of the communist regime led by Dr. Najibullah after the Soviet withdrawal in (…)