2024

[fond noir][blanc]TRIBUTEblanc]fond noir]
The life story of Ahmad Salim, who died in December last year, is of a boy born in a West Punjabi village in 1945 who rose to be an eminent poet, writer, researcher, scholar-activist, translator, archivist and above all, a socialist of exceptional qualities who waged a life long fight for truth, justice, peace, and rights of workers, peasants, religious and linguistic minorities (especially of women in these identities) not only in Pakistan but in (…)

Have you noticed how there aren’t any new French intellectuals any more? There was a veritable flood in the late ’70s and early ’80s: Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, Kristeva, Lyotard, de Certeau ... but there has been almost no one since. Trendy academics and intellectual hipsters have been forced to endlessly recycle theories now 20 or 30 years old, or turn to countries like Italy or even Slovenia for dazzling meta-theory.
Pioneering French anthropologist Marcel Mauss studied “gift (…)

PEOPLE’S UNION FOR CIVIL LIBERTIES
PRESS RELEASE
13th March, 2024
PUCL is outraged at the move of the Central Government to implement the CAA 2019 weeks before the election and demands that the law be repealed.
PUCL has filed an urgent application for stay on the implementation of the law before the Supreme Court.
PUCL will continue to fight against citizenship laws such as the CAA which are unconstitutional and discriminate on grounds of religion.
People’s Union for Civil (…)

Communist Party of India
Date: 12.03.2024
Press Release
CPI on Notification of CAA Rules
The National Secretariat of the Communist Party of India issued the following statement today (on March 12, 2024) on the notification of Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) amended rules:
The Union home ministry in a calculated move notified the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) rules as amended by Parliament in 2019 on March 12, 2024, claiming that this would enable minorities persecuted on (…)

[fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir]
by Alice Oates
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Immeasurable Weather: Meteorological Data and Settler Colonialism from 1820 to Hurricane Sandy
by Sara J. Grossman
Duke University Press 2023. Illustrations. 264 pp. (paper), ISBN 978-1-4780-2502-3 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4780-2005-9
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Immeasurable Weather is the story of “how settler colonialism, white supremacy, and heteropatriachal power informed, upheld, and bolstered meteorological science and data (…)

[fond noir][blanc]TRIBUTEblanc]fond noir]
March 8, 2024
Eddie Webster (82), sociologist and emeritus professor at the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, who died on 5 March 2024, lived a huge life, applying himself to many different arenas with great energy and insight.
His achievements are quite extraordinary. He was an intellectual, a teacher, a leader, an activist for social change, a builder of institutions, a rugby player (…)

* Hindu nationalism poses a threat to democratic politics in India & Nepal | Rana, Thapa & Pandey
* War on Gaza: Millions of anti-war protestors are the hope for the future | Arundhati Roy
* Political Polarization on Citizen Amendment Act and Campaign Strategies in Delhi Assembly Elections, 2020 | V.K. Sridhar
* Some Aspects of the Southern Question (1926) | Antonio Gramsci

Letter to the Readers, Mainstream, March 9, 2024
India keeps the high distinction of being a deeply misogynist society with no signs of any decline in everyday sexual violence. On top of it over the past decade, we have been ruled by the BJP a socially reactionary political party exuding patriarchy from every pore. In the week gone by frontpage news splash was on the gang-rape of a Spanish woman, a cross-country motorbike rider who was on an overnight halt in Dumka in Jharkhand state from (…)

Message on International Women’s Day from a Practicing Feminist - March 8, 2024
Though I am a male, I have been advocating for women’s liberation and empowerment from a long time.
All religions subordinated the women’s status. The Constitution of India, promulgated on 26th January 1950, was the first bold and principled document to uplift women — not only through the guarantee of equality embodied in Article 14 of the Constitution – but also from sub-clause (3) of Article 15 which (…)

by Arun Srivastava
Majority of the intelligentsia and illuminati, the conscience keepers, have been responsible for degeneration of secularism. ethical values and laying the red carpet for the majestic entry of the fascist and rightist BJP in the Indian polity. These people have been simply enjoying their adoration sitting in their ivory homes. They never bothered to caution or warn the political forces claiming to be secularists from digressing or taking the invasion of the rightist (…)