Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Mahatma Gandhi’s Vow of Fearlessness Getting Reflected in Rahul Gandhi’s Appeal to People to Shed Fear | S N Sahu

  7 January 2023, by S N Sahu

  While spearheading Bharat Jod Yatra (BJY) and undertaking the arduous journey on foot from Kanyakumari to Kashmir, Rahul Gandhi, apart from stressing the objectives of BJY, among others, to unify India by countering hatred has been recurrently telling people, "Daro Mat”, (Do not be afraid of ) and act fearlessly to defeat politics of divisiveness and intolerance . He is exhorting lakhs of people spontaneously joining the BJY with abounding enthusiasm that they should get rid of fear. His (…)

• Recent Pandemic Debates Emphasize Careful Review of All Evidence in Policy | Bharat Dogra

  7 January 2023, by Bharat Dogra

  While health policy makers need to be guided by careful evidence-based approach in all times, this need has increased all the more in recent times due to two important factors. Firstly, of course there are the pandemic related factors. Secondly, there is the rapid increase in the dominance of the profit motive in health sector. Although in India the economic discourse has been dominated more by the Adani-Ambani discussion, it is in the health sector (which ideally should be the sector which (…)

• Understanding Bollywood Boycotts | Ahmed Raza

  7 January 2023

  by Ahmed Raza *
  EVER SINCE THE film Pathaan’s song ‘Besharam Rang’ has been released, a call for boycotting the Shah Rukh Khan-starrer has been doing the rounds on social media in India. This is nothing new. Shah Rukh has come back to films after a five-year hiatus looking sleeker than either Aamir or Akashay, all in their post-50s and contemporaries, even younger-looking than Salman who makes a cameo appearance in this film.
  Every time a big Bollywood star comes with a new film, the (…)

• Private Universities: Where Do India’s Intellectuals Stand? | Prem Singh

  7 January 2023, by Prem Singh

  1
  Ravela Somaiya, a senior socialist friend living in Hyderabad, had sent a video to me about two months back. I opened the video and found Ramchandra Guha’s speech in it, which was delivered at Ashoka University, Sonipat, Haryana. I closed the video without listening to that speech. This university came into limelight last year for abruptly terminating the services of Professor Pratap Bhanu Mehta. He had been the Vice Chancellor of this university for two years between 2017 and 2019. He (…)

• Militarisation Of Bhagat Singh’s Revolutionary Heritage | Shamsul Islam

  7 January 2023, by Shamsul Islam

  The following quote is from the first paragraph of Lenin’s great work; The State and Revolution:The Marxist Theory of the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution (1917) underlining a cardinal truth; how rulers and their henchmen/women repress those ideologies and individuals who strive to emancipate masses from the exploitative rules. This chameleon like lot uses every trick in their criminal armoury.
  “What is now happening to Marx’s theory has, in the course of history, (…)

• Significance of the Launch of Digital Currency by India’s Central Bank | Anil Kumar Kanungo and Ujjvala Kanungo

  7 January 2023

  by Anil Kumar Kanungo and Ujjvala Kanungo *
  Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) decisive move to initially discount the growing promises and popularity of crypto currency in India is quite praiseworthy. In a highly uncertain, volatile and non-transparent global financial regime, adoption of cryptos as a currency runs the risk of putting Indian economy into jeopardy. What instead worth considering was a controlled, transparent and reliable digital currency such as CBDC (Central Bank Digital (…)

• India’s fumbled chance for sharing knowledge | Subbiah Arunachalam and Muthu Madhan

  7 January 2023

  by Subbiah Arunachalam and Muthu Madhan *
  India was an early leader in sharing research and information for science. But it has fumbled since then.
  In terms of open access to knowledge, India could have been the Vishwa Guru — the world’s teacher. As early as 2000 India was making moves to allow taxpayer-funded research to be freely available for anyone in the world to read, share and distribute. But India has squandered that advantage.
  Fast forward to 2022, and much of India’s research (…)

• The Tree’s Gift | Sagari Chhabra

  7 January 2023, by Sagari Chhabra

  One day the tree tired of staying rooted on the brown soil, decided to foil, the onlookers, who rushed by in the traffic of haste, leaving footprints of waste; never paying any heed to her inner beauty.
  She saw her fragrant pink pistils discarded for pistols, her stamen stamped by men in boots, who climbed up constructing a security hatch, sensing a plot to kill a dignitary; all this damaged her dignity.
  She stood alone, quite forlorn; stopped her offerings of flowers, shoots and (…)

• Mysterious missing pages of Babarnama | Sankar Ray

  7 January 2023, by Sankar Ray

  The Baburnama, English (Memoirs of Babur), memoir of a poet-prince from Central Asia and the founder of Mogul empire in India , Zahiru’d-din Muhamad Babur (1483–1530), translated by Annette Susannah Beveridge from the original Turki and published in 1922. It was originally written in Chaghatai Turkish which is different from Turki. Mrs Beveridge’s version, mysteriously spiked pages of the diary between 3 April and 17 September 1528 . Mrs Beveridge was the wife a British ICS officer Henry (…)

• Why LTTE Can Never Be Revived | M R Narayan Swamy

  7 January 2023, by M R Narayan Swamy

  More than 13 years after it met an inglorious end, one thing can be said with certainty about the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE): the once-feared insurgent group can never come alive again.
  Occasional arrests of people allegedly linked to the LTTE trigger speculation that attempts may be on to revive an outfit which once controlled a third of all land and two-thirds of the winding coastline in Sri Lanka.
  Nothing can be farther from the truth.
  Whatever opinion one may hold (…)