Mainstream Weekly

Nationalist Discourse: Hundred Years of Sociology in India

Samit Kar — 2018-10-07T13:39:01Z

One hundred years have passed since the inception of the Department of Sociology in Bombay University. Here Sociology began to be taught and studied for the first time in India at the University level. Patrick Geddes (October 2, 1854-April 17, 1932), a distinguished Scottish Biologist, Sociologist, Geographer, Philanthropist and Town Planner, took the major initiative to establish the Department.
Geddes turned his attention to Sociology after an attack of blindness while working in Mexico. (…)

- 2018

India in Peril

Samit Kar — 2018-09-25T21:06:20Z

The word

- 2018

Manufacturing Discontent

Samit Kar — 2018-05-05T16:33:49Z

Noam Chomsky co-authored with Edward S. Herman to write Manufacturing Consent (1988) to uphold the agony of modernity to raise a manufactured consensual social reality keeping at bay the natural voice of protest, The authors lamented how the liberalised regime in the contemporary global order had been incessantly portraying a mystifying peaceful social order. There is a growing crisis looming in different spheres of society: economy, culture, value, politics, morality and perhaps in all (…)

- 2018

Lethal Game

Samit Kar — 2017-09-09T11:40:33Z

The world seems to be riding a Time Machine. Almost every day, people come across surprises and horrors never heard of before. The world has always led to a series of path-breaking events and epochs leading to lapidary social changes. But many of the recent changes are simply unbelievable and no socio-psychological explanation can prove to be worthy to find a plausible answer. The recent spate of incidence of the Blue Whale Game by a large number of students and adolescents repeatedly (…)

- 2017

Nivedita, the Writer-Journalist

Samit Kar — 2016-11-07T05:42:35Z

Sister Nivedita was a firebrand disciple of Vivekananda. She lived in India for 13 years (1898-1911). She could have the association of her Master for only three years and five months and worked wholeheartedly for the cause of freedom of India for the remaining nine years. But her initial stint in India is more well known than the latter. It is rather imperative to put the content of social discourse straight in the context of her 150th birth anniversary on October 28, 2016.
Vivekananda (…)

- 2016

Left is Left Out

Samit Kar — 2011-12-09T10:13:53Z

May 13, 2011 happened to be an important day in the annals of the political history of West Bengal. The outcome of the State poll, which was published that day, made way for the exit of a 34-year-long rule of the Left Front. In the 2006 poll the Left Front got 235 seats of the total 294 in the State Assembly. This time the figure plummeted to an abysmal low of 61 in favour of the Left making way to the formation of a new State Government under the Trinamul Congress (TMC). Ever since the (…)

- 2011

Taming the Beasts

Samit Kar — 2011-11-05T14:20:03Z

West Bengal has seen Friday, May 13 this year. The majority of the Bengalis might not have considered this day horrifying as the poll outcome did suggest. Instead, this day did mark the cut-off point of a long legacy which made West Bengal to be a State with a difference. The difference was not limited to the gamut of political affiliation. There had been a rise of a number of impediments which made this State to become unmanageable to render good governance. This happens to be the horror of (…)

- 2011

Might of Religion Revalidated in Myanmar

Samit Kar — 2007-10-22T16:14:02Z

Religion is usually considered as a tranquillising force. It dulls the pain and suffering of the teeming millions and leads individuals to a world of mystic glory. But in reality, religion does have a great power—which may even lead to a great turbulence and initiate mighty social change against the commanding heights of an autocratic regime. The recent development in Myanmar and the sustained movement of the Buddhist monks and nuns have exposed the limitations of the apparently strong (…)

- October 20, 2007