2025

The Private University Interlude in Tamil Nadu: The Post-Exit Scenario
The Hasty Interlude
On 16th October 2025, the Government of Tamil Nadu unexpectedly and hastily introduced a Bill in the Assembly to amend the Tamil Nadu Private University Act 2019 with a view to converting Government Aided Colleges ex mass into Private Universities. The academics were terribly surprised of this sudden interlude. As per the Bill, the 163 Aided Arts and Science Colleges and 3 Aided Technical (…)

(The text appeared first in the Literary quarterly magazine Gangrel, Number 4, London, summer 1946)
From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.
I was the middle child of three, but there was a gap of five (…)

November 14, 2025
The Polit Bureau of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) has issued the following statement:
On Bihar Election Results
The victory of the NDA in the Bihar legislative assembly elections is a setback for the Mahagathbandhan. The ruling coalition utilised the entire state machinery, resorted to various manipulations, and deployed huge amounts of money. It benefited from the polarising communal and casteist rhetoric of its leaders, including the Prime Minister and the (…)

The outcome of the Assembly elections in Bihar is extremely unnatural. It has the scars of SIR all over it. The role of the unprecedented money transfer operation amounting to Rs 30,000 crore among a beneficiary population of 3 crore defying all notions of election ethics and model code of conduct must also be taken into account.
A virtual repeat of the 2010 outcome after fifteen years when the credibility of the Nitish Kumar government has touched an all-time low and the Modi government (…)

[fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEW[/blanc][/fond noir]
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Living On: Psychiatry and the Future of Disaster in Turkey
by Christopher Dole
Stanford University Press
2025. 312 pp.
(cloth), ISBN 978-1-5036-4177-8
(paper), ISBN 978-1-5036-4251-5
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Reviewed by Andrew J. Bielecki (Columbia University)
What does it mean to live through the end of your world? Across the world, humanity has endured one natural disaster after another, some with truly apocalyptic manifestations. (…)

BOOK REVIEW
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The Golden Road:
How Ancient India Transformed the World
by William Dalrymple
Bloomsbury
483; Price: Not given
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When someone speaks about ancient India

* Mamdani, Socialism and Eugene Debs | M.R. Narayan Swamy
* Indira Gandhi

A tribute often paid to social activists is of their lifelong commitment. It is rare
to find someone who got involved with social commitments in middle age and then very quickly established a reputation for complete honesty and limitless courage. This would be even more unexpected for a woman who had hitherto been confined mainly to family responsibilities in a middle-class Delhi household. However, this is precisely what Nirmala Sharma achieved in Delhi, starting around 1991 at the age (…)

If the RSS had not committed the blunder of having a high-profile nationwide celebration of the completion of its 100 years, millions of Indians wouldn’t have known its true character and history. With access to several digital platforms and now AI, Gen Z knows how to uncover the untruth and discover the reality that cannot remain hidden for long, no matter how deep the propaganda aimed at misleading innocent people.
Many facts about the RSS have come to light in the recent past in (…)

Contrary to what we may think, one