2025

The death of Peruvian writer, journalist, essayist and politician and Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa marks the end of a golden age of Latin American literature. With his demise the Latin American boon has faded. As Angel Esteban del Campo of University of Granada, Spain, writes,

LE MONDE DIPLOMATIQUE, November 2010
Last October 7, the Swedish Academy announced that it was awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature 2010 to the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa. This exquisite novelist was long on the list of "Nobelizables". But his constant militant commitment to ultraliberal ideology had ruled him out until today. Indeed, by the will of Alfred Nobel, not only the literary work of the award-winning author must have "brought eminent services to humanity" but the writer (…)

[fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir]
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Birth of an Alternative Development Paradigm: Unfolding of Transformative Mode of Production
by Sunil Ray
Germinal Publications Pvt. Ltd. (Publisher of frontier weekly)
2024. 250 INR.
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Development is the buzzword of today. Everybody speaks of it as if it is the only religion and pursuit of the modern day. In his populist book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari (2015) argued that the ability of man to (…)

[fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir]
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Poland and European East-West Cooperation in the 1970s:
The Opening Up
by Aleksandra Komornicka
Routledge
2024. 246 pp.
(cloth), ISBN 978-1-03-239216-5
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Reviewed by Pawel Markiewicz (Polski Instytut Spraw Miedzynarodowych)
For many who lived in Poland through the 1970s, the decade is often remembered and described as an era of political liberalization and social prosperity. Coming on the heels of Polish United Workers

* Social Cost of Automobility | Sunil Dharan
* Jagathamma

Letter to the Readers, Mainstream
Over the past years there have been a multiple instances of long standoffs between opposition ruled states and the State Governors. The opposition parties in India had come to accuse the central Government in Delhi of trying to use the constitutional position of the Governor to subvert governmental affairs from a back door and block legislation adopted by state assemblies. Under the Modi Govt some of the Governors got their job because they were from the (…)

The Modi government and its kept media have gone to town blowing their trumpet over getting home on Thursday April 10 night Tahawwur Husain Rana, one of the co-conspirators in the 26/11 Mumbai terror attack.
Prime Minister Modi who believes he can turn any political crisis facing his government into a profitable capital has given such a play to the United States of America (USA) of President Donald Trump sending over to India a co-conspirator of 26/11 attack with a big tamasha- two senior (…)

Corruption has become a part and parcel of contemporary public life in India. It is noteworthy that West Bengal did not figure in the list of top 8 corrupt states in India, according to the India Corruption Survey 2019, an independent survey which sought around 1,90,000 responses. On the other hand, West Bengal found its place in the list of the least corrupt states (See www.moneycontrol.com)
The Supreme Court verdict on April 4, 2025, is concerned with the gigantic recruitment scam of the (…)

A very important component of the progress of a country consists of democratic and peaceful social movements which seek to correct various distortions and flawed decisions, as seen from a perspective which is different from that of decision-making powerful authorities. This perspective is often based on considerations of justice and environment protection, reflected in trying to prevent avoidable displacement of a large number of people, including farmers, and preventing many kinds of (…)

on the arrest of a fifteen-year-old girl who got caught in the crossfire during the first phase of the Naxalite movement in Kerala.
When the time came to put her memories on paper, from the myriad faces she must have come across during her eventful life up to that point in time, Ajitha recollects in a few lines the one of Jagathamma, a young girl, whom she saw just once at the Manantavady police station accompanying Mandakini, her own mother, after both were arrested following the (…)