Edward Curtin “A treasure stumbled upon, suddenly; not gradually accumulated, by adding one to one. The accumulation of learning, ‘adding to the sum-total of human knowledge’; lay that burden down, that baggage, that impediment. Take nothing for your journey; travel light.” Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body These are “heavy” times, colloquially speaking. Forebodings everywhere. Everything broken. …
Guest post by DILIP SIMEON [Names and publications of cited authors are listed at the end of the essay.] The sophists taught, rather publicly, the view that the summit of happiness is to combine the appearance of justice with actual injustice: Gregory McBrayer (2015), p 44 To speak of justice has always been to plunge … Continue reading The Lady Vanishes – Justice and Law in Our Age: Dilip Simeon →
न्यू सोशलिस्ट इनिशिएटिव की तरफ से आयोजित ‘डेमोक्रेसी डायलॉग्स सीरीज ‘ का 12 वां व्याख्यान अग्रणी लेखक, स्तम्भकार, दिल्ली विश्वविद्यालय में हिंदी विभाग से सम्बद्ध प्रोफेसर अपूर्वानंद 6 बजे शाम, रविवार, 28 नवम्बर 2021 को प्रस्तुत करेंगे। विषय : ‘वैष्णवजन की खोज में’ “वैष्णवजन की कल्पना को राजनीतिक और सामाजिक पटल पर स्थापित करने का … Continue reading वैष
[Prefatory Note: This opinion piece was published in Middle East Eye on May 18,2021, and republished in Il Manifesto and The Wire under different titles. It attempts to contextualize the current violence directed against Gaza in earlier Israeli provocations. It also takes note of Israel’s reliance on excessive force in its attack upon an essentially […]
Behavioural psychologists say hatred and fear are two sides of the same coin. That explains the Hindu Right obsession with Gandhi and Godse.
[Prefatory Note: I wrote the text below before being aware of the drastic challenges posed for the human species in 2020: the COVID-19 pandemic, systemic racism, Trump & Trumpism. These challenges are posed in their most extreme forms in the United States, not only the first global state, but also the first failed global state, exporting its failures far beyond normal borders of time and space.
Guest Post by SURAJ JACOB [Note: This article was written before the ongoing violence in Delhi began and is not about current affairs. It rather engages with the political problem at a broader philosophical level. – AN] Analysts of Delhi’s recent election note thatAAP imaginatively courted voters on the BJP’s own turf (Shekhar Gupta): welfarism … Continue reading Kejriwal and the ‘Dirty Hands Problem’ →
They represented two foundational but antagonistic visions of “what we as a society, what we as a state should embody” ( Review of ‘Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi, and The Risk of Democracy’ By Aishwary Kumar Navayana, Rs 599) In the early 1990s D.R. Nagaraj published The Flaming Feet, a compilation of his essays in which he … Continue reading Lessons from Ambedkar and Gandhi to take forward →
What has Gandhi got to do with the recently concluded elections in Delhi? On the face of it nothing. But at another level, the election process, its campaign and its results – all invite us to revisit Gandhi’s stupendous moral-political project of cementing the Hindu-Muslim division with his own blood and his heroic failure. … Continue reading Winning Delhi Elections – AAP, Gandhi and the Ideology Wars →
From Nehru to Patel and Ambedkar, the saffron party has appropriated freedom-fighters or tarnished legacies. Gandhi, however, poses a different problem. Death ends all enmity’ (Marnanti Vairani) goes a maxim in Hinduism. The story also goes that when Ravana was on death bed, Ram had even asked Laxman to go to him and learn something which no … Continue reading Gandhi and the Hindutva Right →
