2022

They say, cinema is a reflection of society. Now, it is a cliched phrase, but it continues to be true. And at a time when ‘history’ is a conflicted word, perhaps it is cinema that can be best used to tell stories of the past. Like, all the bitter truths about Allied ‘victories’ are best read through the Hollywood series on WWII. Indians are not known as great recordkeepers of the past and even to research stories of India’s freedom fight is a Herculean task. However, this decade has seen (…)

IS it some international conspiracy — or perhaps a secret weapon — that allows Israel to lord over the Mid­­dle East? How did a country of nine million — between one-half and one-third of Karachi’s population — manage to subdue 400m Arabs? A country bui­lt on stolen land and the ruins of destroyed Pal­estinian villages is visibly chuckling away as every Arab government, egged on by the khadim-i-haramain sharifain, lines up to recognise it. Economically fragile Pakistan is being lured into (…)

When politicians die, especially an untimely death in tragic circumstances, obituaries tend to go overboard. A sense of perspectives is lost when obituaries become eulogies. But you can’t falsify history. And in the final analysis, it is the forces of history that write the course of politics rather than individuals, and the fact is Japan has a gory past, a blood-soaked and brutal imperial past.
Almost all of Japan’s neighbours paid a high price for its hegemonist ambitions and thirst for (…)

BOOK REVIEW
The Struggle for Narmada: An Oral History of the Narmada Bachao Andolan by Adivasi Leaders Keshavbhau and Kevalsingh Vasave
Author: Nandini Oza
Orient BlackSwan Pages: 273; Price: Rs 815
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Long before anyone thought of using bulldozers to raze homes of critics, the Indian state employed far worse tactics on tribal people fighting a dam by uprooting them from areas where they had lived for centuries. In scenes from medieval times, the authorities simply flooded (…)

* Against The Dying of The Light - Bharat Ratna Frontier Gandhi, Badshah Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (1890-1988): A Note | Anil Nauriya
* Colombia turns to the left | Juan C Hernandez
* Sri Lanka: Gotabaya’s grand game-plan | Apratim Mukarji
* Paper unions’ letting down China’s internal migrant workers | Jason Hung

Letter to the Readers, Mainstream, July 9, 2022
Flash-floods in China, Germany, Brazil, and South Africa in 2021/2022 at the same time record-high temperatures in Canada and parts of the US faced made world news. Climate change is not some abstract thing it is very real and yet the power elites seem not to see the elephant in the room and seriously plan for it. Global warming is making the world hotter and creating extreme weather events. What will it take to make climate change and (…)

[This note is being circulated for the attention of the candidates in the elections for the offices of President and Vice President of India and the respective electoral colleges in these elections. Recently, taking advantage of Covid lockdowns, the Haryana Government renamed Badshah Khan Hospital in Haryana after Atal Behari Vajpayee. This was done although the Frontier Gandhi, Badshah Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (1890-1988), was, apart from other things, a recipient of the Bharat Ratna. He (…)

by Juan C Hernandez *
The victory of Gustavo Petro and Francia Márquez of the leftist alliance Pacto Histórico, last June in the second round of the presidential elections marks a new era in the political history of Colombia and the Latin American region.
Its importance is not limited to the fact that a former member of the urban guerrilla and a social leader from the country’s poorest region, two outsiders to the political system, will govern one of the Latin American largest economies (…)

Very recently, the eminent human rights activist, Teesta Setalvad was arrested by the Gujarat Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) officials for “allegedly fabricating evidence, committing forgery and criminal conspiracy”. This happened a day after the Supreme Court dismissed a petition challenging the clean chit given by the Special Investigation Team (SIT) to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and 63 others in the 2002 Gujarat riots case”. (www.indiatoday.in)
In her memoir titled ‘Foot Soldier of the (…)

Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, fighting a united population, has now embarked upon a grand strategy to bring all politicians under his wing, irrespective of their party affiliations, so that the people in the country are fooled and deprived of their natural right to justice. It is a devilish plan to rob the Sri Lankans of their united fight against him, the last of the Rajapaksas, a clan that had grabbed all powers in the recent years in its hands and was ruling the country at (…)