2023

Nandini was born into an illustrious family in Odisha. It was a family of intellectuals and writers. Before independence, this sort of family was the rarest of rare ones in Odisha. Her father and other uncles were writers. All of them were humanists and wrote of the common man’s sufferings. Her father Kalindi Panigrahi perhaps was an outstanding writer. He was a story writer and novelist and poet. He has written poems for children to elder people. His novel Matir Manish is a unique one. It (…)

The composition of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in India has undergone continuous changes wherein the share of agriculture especially crop production has been continuously reduced from 42 % in 1970-71 to about 23 % in 2000-01 to about 14 % in 2020-21; whereas, the share of crop production in GDP has come down to around 10% ((GOI, 2021a). These changes may have percolated in the sources of personal Income of various sections of the society, especially Agricultural Households (AHHs). The (…)

Problems of working-class colonies in Delhi get very little attention in the city’s media, but as recent visits to three such colonies revealed, these can be very serious.
What is common to all these three colonies is that the earnings of most households do not allow them to have any savings as with great difficulty they can only manage the essential expenses. Hence any period of extended unemployment caused by illness, injury (including occupational injury which can be frequent), lockdown (…)

PRESS STATEMENT
19 October 2023, Islamabad, The Women’s Action Forum (WAF) strongly condemns the brutal, indiscriminate, and incessant assault by the Israeli occupation power on the Gaza Strip. Intensified attacks by Israel that began on 7 October 2023 have reportedly killed nearly 3,000 people including about 700 children and injured more than 10,000 people. The horrifying bombing of the Al-Ahli Hospital is a devastating part of the continuum of violence that adds to compelling evidence (…)

"Those of us who are Arab Palestinian citizens of Israel are uniquely positioned to see through his bluster and warmongering to the failure he really is—truths that the past several days have laid bare."
Oct 19, 2023
A Palestinian member of the Israeli Knesset took to the pages of The New York Times on Thursday to call for global action to end the deadly siege of Gaza and prevent far-right Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from using the ongoing conflict as an opportunity to permanently (…)

19th October, 2023
Quite understandably, global attention continues to be single-mindedly focussed on the inhuman killing of spectators in a music concert in Gaza by the Hamas group recently. Nearly 1400 Israeli nationals were killed and thousands injured in the Hamas attack, leading to a strong military response by Israel.
Condemnable as Hamas’s violent actions were, the issue needs to be understood from a wider international and regional perspective that characterises the larger (…)

October 20, 2023
Israel will likely win the Gaza war on the battlefield. Even so, it has already been defeated in the court of public opinion.
It no longer really matters who attacked Gaza’s Al Ahli Arab Hospital in which hundreds of innocent civilians were killed or the Greek Orthodox Saint Porphyrius Church in the Strip.
Public opinion has issued its verdict on the streets of cities across the Middle East and beyond.
It took the attack on the hospital, which Israel asserts involved (…)

A man and a woman lie on a white bed.
It is morning. I think
Soon they will waken.
On the bedside table is a vase
of lilies; sunlight
pools in their throats.
I watch him turn to her
as though to speak her name
but silently, deep in her mouth–
At the window ledge,
once, twice,
a bird calls.
And then she stirs; her body
fills with his breath.
I open my eyes; you are watching me.
Almost over this room
the sun is gliding.
Look at your face, you say,
holding your own close to (…)

My daughter
wouldn’t hurt a spider
That had nested
Between her bicycle handles
For two weeks
She waited
Until it left of its own accord
If you tear down the web I said
It will simply know
This isn’t a place to call home
And you’d get to go biking
She said that’s how others
Become refugees isn’t it?
Source: The above poem is available online at Poetry Foundation it appeared in Alight (Copper Canyon Press, 2013). This poem is reproduced here for educational and non-commercial (…)

October 17, 2023
Unlawful attacks by the Indian government have intensified since the 7th October 2023 Palestinian resistance against the Zionist entity of Israel, against all who are coming in solidarity with the Palestinian people. In Uttar Pradesh, four students at Aligarh Muslim University were booked under IPC’s Sections 153A (promoting enmity among different groups), 188 (disobedience to order promulgated by public servant) and 505 (statements conducting to public mischief) for (…)