Life

          Many benefits and schemes available for persons with various disabilities cannot reach them, particularly in more remote villages, as much effort is needed for linking persons with disabilities (PwDs) with the various schemes meant for providing relief and benefits to them . Due to past neglect the number of PwDs can be not only surprisingly high in several remote[Read More...]

           In many big debates on agriculture in India the name of Dr. R.H.Richharia inevitably comes up, even though top establishment persons and powerful interests want to avoid this. One reason why this name of Dr. Richharia comes up time and again is that he was an extremely learned and distinguished  scientist, certainly the top rice scientist from India. Many[Read More...]

People know him mainly as an activist of the famous Chipko movement, but the reality of the  life of Kunwar Prasun was that his yearnings for creating a better world were constantly taking him from one struggle and constructive engagement to another. A deeply committed Gandhian all his life, Prasun was guided only by his understanding of what is truth[Read More...]

India currently is in the grip of ‘constructed Hate’. This in turn has led to violence against vulnerable sections of society, particularly religious minorities and dalits. As such one understands that love is a natural phenomenon and Hatred is generally a phenomenon constructed around misconceptions about the targeted sections of society. These targeted sections of society have to bear the[Read More...]

It was a tense day in Peshawar in 1930.The freedom movement under the guidance of Badshah Khan and the overall national leadership of Mahatma Gandhi was progressing from strength to strength. The Khudai Khidmatgars ( literally those who have committed themselves to serving God through service to humanity ) organized by the Badshah ( literally king, so called as he[Read More...]

Today on February 11th the Indian Communist movement celebrates the 104th birth anniversary of legendary Comrade Tarimela Nagi Reddy.Without doubt he was one of the most outstanding personalities ever in the history of the Communist movement and arguably contributed more as an architect of the massline than any Indian revolutionary. Imbibing his teachings are important even today when the Indian[Read More...]

Comrade Amritpal Passi or Jagseer left us exactly 13 years ago on February 9th, tragically succumbing to Cancer. He was a state Commitee member of the Communist Party Re-Organisation Centre of India (Marxist Leninist) We also commemorated his 70th birthday on January 22nd this year. Without doubt he was one of the most defining or impactful comrades in Punjab his[Read More...]

Several events were narrated to me about ‘the left political spectrum’ before I became a member, and worked with a couple of political organisations within this spectrum in Kolkata. Before Kolkata, in Pune, I was a part of college protest events at BMCC and ILS both, after the tragic murder of the rationalist, Dr. Narendra Dabholkar in 2013, and had[Read More...]

February 6 is the 131st birth anniversary of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan also popularly known as Frontier Gandhi and Badshah Khan. He was a prominent Indian freedom fighter, a die-hard opponent of the two-nation theory and the idea of Pakistan. He was totally committed to Gandhi’s idea of non-violence, enjoyed the same stature in the NWFP also known as Frontier[Read More...]

When a European graduate student emailed to ask if I would participate in an assignment to “do an interview with one of my favourite authors,” I said yes. My books have not exactly been best-sellers, and so I was an easy target for anyone describing me as a “favourite author.” But beyond my gratitude for someone noticing my writing, I[Read More...]