Mainstream Weekly

Music Had to Be in Tune With the Soviet Party Line: Composer Dmitri Shostakovich Paid A Price - a short note | Harsh Kapoor

Harsh Kapoor — 2021-05-29T13:38:49Z

by Harsh Kapoor
Music at the service of ideology and party bureaucracy in the Soviet Union
The Russian music composer and pianist Dmitri Shostakovich was born in St Petersburg. In 1919, when he was 13 years old, Shostakovich joined the Petrograd Conservatory. After his graduation, he worked as a trained concert pianist and composer on contracts for all kinds of state entities that existed in the USSR.
He was a very active part of the progressive current of musicians of the (…)

- Video / Audio / Audio / Video

Young Mayakovsky's Letter to his Sister in 1905

Harsh Kapoor — 2020-06-09T12:22:38Z

Vladimir Mayakovsky (7 July 1893 – 14 April 1930) was a Soviet poet, playwright, artist, and actor, he also edited the art journal LEF, and created posters in support of the Communist Party. Mayakovsky often found himself in a confrontation with the Soviet State over cultural censorship and the development of the State doctrine of Socialist realism. Works that contained criticism or satire of aspects of the Soviet system, such as the poem "Talking With the Taxman About Poetry" (1926), and (…)

- Visuals / Art Work

Talking Equality To a Conservative Majoritarian Society

Harsh Kapoor — 2018-09-15T15:17:59Z

by Harsh Kapoor
In four separate and combined judgments on September 6, 2018, in the Navtej Singh Johar case a Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court of India ruled that Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (a colonial era provision from 1860) was discriminatory to the extent that it penalised consensual sex between adults. Chief Justice Dipak Misra introduced the verdict saying: 'vanish, prejudice and embrace inclusion and ensure equal rights' . . . 'Any discrimination on the basis of (…)

- 2018

French Presidential Elections 2017: Macron's Victory offers a Much-needed Reprieve against Narrow Nationalism

Harsh Kapoor — 2017-05-20T11:04:28Z

by Harsh Kapoor
In the April 23 first round of the French elections, the established parties were eliminated, leaving two final contenders in the final round of May 7—one was Emmanuel Macron (a former Economy Minister/a cosmopolitan political novice) representing his newly created movement called ‘En Marche' [On the Move] and the other was Marine Le Pen, the leader of the forty-year-old Front Nationale (FN) [an anti-immigrant and anti-European party of the far Right]. Two opposing (…)

- 2017

Brexit working class counter-revolution | Harsh Kapoor

Harsh Kapoor — 2016-07-09T09:07:45Z

Brexit is a triumph of national chauvinism and is damaging to the Left. We have seen a dramatic spurt in instances of racism all over Britain. All this is a shot in the arm for the far Right.

- 2016

Perverted Logic of Powerful Corporate Interests drive the India-France Nuclear Connection

Harsh Kapoor — 2016-02-13T23:30:29Z

by Harsh Kapoor
The French President was in India as the chief guest at the surreal nationalist military parade of January 26, 2016. As is the practice, he was accompanied by a high-powered delegation and many multilateral deals got signed between the two countries. There are big ones that have been in the news, have been in the making for many years and may still take time to fructify. These concern the sale by France of nuclear power plants and of flying war toys to India.
India's (…)

- 2015

Greece - Caught Between Scylla and Charybdis: Europe and the Future for Syriza Government

Harsh Kapoor — 2015-03-22T09:40:12Z

by Harsh Kapoor
Let us begin with some jottings from history. In our imagination Greece occupies the bedrock of key Western ideas with its first city states and the idea of democracy, but that was ancient Greece. Modern Greece, as we know, has had an important place in Europe after it emerged breaking free from the Ottoman empire in the 1820s with the intervention of France, Britain and Russia. A very poor and essentially rural country then with a limited state under the deep sway of (…)

- 2015

Long Live Charlie Hebdo!

Harsh Kapoor — 2015-01-31T17:48:56Z

about the January 2015 terror attack on the Paris satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo and its gross misinterpretation by people of Left liberal sensibilities in India and much of the world.

- 2015

Nuclear Industry's Cover-Up, Lies And Denial: Beware of the French Nuclear Model

Harsh Kapoor — 2011-04-25T11:29:18Z

To this day, contradictory estimations of the magnitude as well as the consequences of the Fukushima disaster continue to illustrate how an iron hand seems to tightly control information, in the ‘larger interests', and the world's major nuclear energy firms, pro-nuclear lobbies, Japan itself along with international authorities such as WHO, IAEA or CTBTO, seem to be engaged in the organised downplaying and retention of a precious information that citizens' groups claim is already in their possession. Secrecy is built into the nuclear establishment's mindset everywhere, and it prevails across the nuclear industry internationally.

- 2011