Earlier this year we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the entry of Greg Chappell into the arena of International cricket which was against England at Perth in February in 1971. Ironically he scored a century in his debut after coming in with his side in a precarious position of 107 for the loss of five wickets. From the very word[Read More...]
Very sadly our beloved comrade Vira Sathidar left us recently at the age of 61 on April 13th due to covid illness.Ironically he expired on the very date of the historic Jallianawalla Bagh massacre. I can’t express how bereaved it made so many around feel or my personal affection for him. One of the liveliest and most positive comrades within[Read More...]
The present state of Muslims in India and elsewhere in the world is so beautifully captured in the following poignant words of one of the most celebrated contemporary Muslim intellectuals, Ziauddin Sardar in one of his books: “Muslims are sundered, divided and factional within, as much as they cherish a sense of superiority over other societies that they lack within[Read More...]
Without doubt Dilip Vengsarkar is one of the finest batsmen ever to have graced a cricket field. This week we commemorate the feat of Dilip Vengsarkar becoming the 1st overseas batsman ever to score three consecutive centuries in test matches at Lords. It is a landmark that would inscribe a permanent place in the museum of cricket. We also coincidentally[Read More...]
Comrade Satnam or Gurmeet Singh was one of the most original thinkers in the ranks of the democratic revolutionary movement. Rarely in recent times could we meet a human being with such a degree of intelligence or sensitivity. I met him first in December in 2015 in Patiala, staying a night at his place. He was inactive politically being compelled[Read More...]
The pandemic- tobacco is killing around 40 lakh people every year in India alone, while corona killed 3.29 lakh only so far from first and second waves. There was an interesting question before Supreme Court, whether a person has a right to die. That led to another question whether ‘life’ includes ‘death’. What is life? The line between two dots[Read More...]
Today we celebrate the 50th anniversary of Imran stepping his first foot into the arena of test cricket, at Edgbaston cricket ground in Birmingham.It was reminiscent of Amitabh Bacchan flashing on the Hindi film screen for the first time, where he hardly even looked a shadow of his later self. It would have been very hard for anyone to gauge[Read More...]
In June 1971, exactly 50 years ago at Edgbaston cricket ground at Birmingham in England, the bespectacled Zaheer Abbas gave the first flash of his illustrious cricketing career .His monumental 274 was amongst cricket’s classics taking aestheticism to regions of the sublime. For nine hours, ten minutes spectators were virtually put into a trance witnessing the glorious strokes all around[Read More...]
“Cultivation of the Mind should be the ultimate aim of human existence” – said Dr. B. R. Ambedkar. Well, what could be more stimulating and productive than art? The art of creating something, where the brain intercepts an idea and grows it into a manifold entity. Whether it’s writing an article, a poem, a story or making a painting, a[Read More...]
Posing the Question This year marks the 57th anniversary of Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1964). This text, although plagued with a pessimistic spirit, was a great source of inspiration for the development of the New Left and the May 68 uprisings. The question we must ask ourselves is whether a text that predates the last 50 years of neoliberalism has[Read More...]
