2022

The Editors Guild of India is deeply anguished by the shutting down of the Kashmir Press Club by the Government of Jammu and Kashmir, on January 17, 2022

BOOK REVIEW
Yogi Adityanath: Religion, Politics and Power - The Untold Story
by Sharat Pradhan and Atul Chandra
Penguin Random House
288 Pages
Nov/2021
ISBN: 9780143442431
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Will Yogi Adityanath be the Prime Minister of India one day? Does the monk-turned-Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, qualify for the coveted job? If journalists Sharat Pradhan and Atul Chandra are to be believed, this could become a possibility; in any case, Adityanath, (…)

BOOK REVIEW
One of the most pernicious aspects of standard world-historical narratives is precisely that they dry everything up, reduce people to cardboard stereotypes, simplify the issues in ways that themselves undermine, possibly even destroy, our sense of human possibility....One problem with evolutionism is that it takes ways of life that developed in symbiotic relation with each other and reorganizes them into separate stages of human history. By the late nineteenth century, it was (…)

My child asks, ‘when leaves fall do they cry?’
‘Not that I know’, I reply.
‘Then do they sigh?’
They rustle in the wind
and feed the microbes
invisible as a djinn.
They nourish the soil
in which the tree is grounded,
this is what in nature, is founded.
We are surrounded
by interbeing,
interlinked, without ever seeing.
The leaves do not die,
they only change appearances,
without so much as a sigh.
In the beginning it is seen,
the leaves are green;
then they turn
as they (…)

January 12, 2022
Astronomers are increasingly drawing back the curtains on black holes. In the past few years, we have finally captured actual photos of these fearsome creatures and measured the gravitational waves – ripples in spacetime – that they create when colliding. But there’s still a lot we don’t know about black holes. One of the biggest enigmas is exactly how they form in the first place.
My colleagues and I now believe we have observed this process, providing some of the best (…)

* Is the nation in crisis? | S G Vombatkere
* On Punjab elections and farmers participation | Chaman Lal
* Remembering the Rupaspur-Chandwa Massacre| Anand Chakravarti
* Modi Against Kashi | Radhakanta Barik

Letter to the Readers, Mainstream, January 15, 2022
The Dates for the 2022 State Assembly elections have been announced by the Election Commission of India for the states of Uttar Pradesh (UP), Uttarakhand, Punjab, Goa, and Manipur, these would be held between Feb 10 and March 7 with counting slated for March 10. The coming elections matter in every state but in UP they are of special importance, given that it is politically the most influential state of India – with the largest population (…)

At the Dharam Sansad conducted at Haridwar, December 17-19, 2021, by Hindu sants and seers, there were calls for killing Muslims to cleanse Indian society. These are calls for genocide. Speakers also called upon army and police personnel to take up arms to kill Muslims. One speaker reportedly called for socio-economic boycott of Indian Muslims, and stated that governments will have to accept and implement this call, failing which a war more gruesome than the 1857 uprising in India against (…)

I have not been very active on Facebook or other social media since few weeks, except sharing links of some good articles/news or sharing some old memories or wishing some friends on their birthday. As I am tied up in submitting a manuscript, whose schedule time has long crossed, so trying to discipline myself. But with all the constraints of time, I do wish to share my views with large number of friends and likeminded people on an issue, which is very crucial in coming days and times. This (…)

On this day (November 22, 1971), 50 years ago, a mob led by the dominant Rajput landowners (henceforth referred to as ’maliks’) massacred 14 Santhals (Adivasis) in the village Rupaspur-Chandwa, in Purnea district (in north Bihar). The massacre was a ghastly response of the maliks to the assertion by their Santhal bataidars (sharecroppers) of their long-standing tenancy rights. The outrage was a bloody climax to several decades of struggle by Santhal bataidars in Dhamdaha revenue circle (in (…)