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Environment
Featured Stories
India
The Logic of Hegemony
On September 8, 2021, at least five media houses and six offices of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI (M)) were vandalized in three of Tripura’s eight districts by the ruling Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP). These instances of violence come after a growth in the intensity of the Left’s political activity. While the center-right Congress Party is in a freefall and the Trinamool[Read More…]
COVID Response Watch
Suicides, drug addiction on rise in MP due to Covid induced job losses
“I am unable to face hunger, future, illness, fee debt, house rent and unemployment” said the four page suicide note. On the night of 27 August 2021 Ravi Thackeray*, an engineer in Bhopal’s Sahara township, aided by his wife Ranjana*, slit the throats of their young son Chirag* and daughter Gunjan* with stone cutters. Soon after, the couple consumed poison[Read More…]
World
The Debacle of “Nation Building” in Afghanistan and Iraq
In one of his interviews before the Taliban retook Afghanistan, John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, blamed the American failure in Afghanistan on a change in Washington’s mission from anti-terrorism to “nation building.” In his view, Washington should just have held strategic sites in the country to keep terrorists off balance and not engaged in an ambitious reconstruction of[Read More…]
Globalisation
Modi government’s economic policies pose an existential threat to backward communities that must be resisted
The present government’s aggressive push for privatisation, corporatisation and automation – deviously dubbed ‘economic reforms’ – is undoing the gains made backward communities in recent decades, and must be resisted at all costs. ‘Economic reforms’ – it’s a catchphrase that India’s media pundits have repeated for three decades like a mantra, a sleight of hand meant to suggest that these[Read More…]
Human Rights
Making Sense of the Eviction Crisis
The Land of the Free, Where So Many of the Brave Are Homeless. Resisting Evictions Amid a Pandemic Over the past weeks, multiple crises have merged: a crisis of democracy with the most significant attack on voting rights since Reconstruction; a climate crisis with lives and livelihoods upended in the Gulf Coast and the Northeast by extreme weather events and in the West by[Read More…]
Imperialism
Canadian Imperialism in Africa
Canadian imperialism in Africa has had a rare social media moment. On Twiter K. Diallo recently posted a map of the continent with the sum of Canadian mining investment in each African country under the words “75% of mining companies globally are now Canadian. Canada is a great source of corporate neocolonialism expansion.” The tweet received 25,000 likes and 8,500 retweets. But[Read More…]
Communal Harmony
Fraternity for direction in troubled times: The patriarchy-caste-religion poison
Complex society India is a diverse country. It has geo-climatic diversity and people who live in different geo-climatic regions have different ways of living and doing, with different cultures. India has been a socio-cultural entity with a civilizational identity for millennia. At Independence, India was a country of amazing complexity of cultures, languages, customs, religions, ethnicities, and an ancient caste[Read More…]
Climate Change
Beware: Big Oil Lies About the Climate
The Current Situation Shockingly, today’s climate crisis is driven by a mere increase of 1˚C in global temperature, primarily caused by the burning of fossil fuels. Unless we take urgent action, the temperature could increase by four times that level within the lifetimes of our children, leaving them to face an apocalyptic future. In the US alone, the recent floods on the[Read More…]
Environmental Protection
DEAD BEES and BUTTERFLIES, FLOWES, TREE and the PLASTIC SEA
Globally, bees and butterflies, the winged beauties of the insect-beasty world, are dying, vanishing from habitat and planet. Bees and butterflies are pollinators. Without them, there will be no flowers. But it does not stop there. The agricultural food chain of humanity collapses. A horrifying explosion of worldwide starvation then results. What happens when people are chronically hungry? What are[Read More…]
Counter Solutions
Agriculture, technology, and addiction
Even for the smallest ailment, people, these days, resort to medicine. They trust that medicines can ‘cure’ the root cause of the disease. Some people take refuge in medicines even without any detectable illness. Nowadays, the SOLUTION to all the PROBLEMS is prescribed in the form of medicines. The answer to everything must be a ‘product’ – this is a[Read More…]
Resource Crisis
Sustaining the Unsustainable: Why Renewable Energy Companies Are Not Climate Warriors
In the fight to address climate change, renewable energy companies are often assumed to be Jedi Knights. Valiantly struggling to save the planet, wind and solar interests are thought to be locked in mortal combat with large fossil fuel corporations that continue to mine, drill, and blast through the earth’s fragile ecosystems, dragging us all into a grim and sweaty[Read More…]
Patriarchy
Women on the verge defending life against the global patriarchy
What if, compañera and sister, we learn not only to scream out of pain, but to find the way, place, and time to scream a new world into being? Just think, sister and compañera, things are so bad that in order to stay alive we have to create another world.’ Coordinators of the Zapatista Women for the Second International Gathering of Women Who Struggle[Read More…]
Palestine
From the ‘Iron Wall’ to the ‘Villa in the Jungle’: Palestinians Demolish Israel’s Security Myths
25 years before Israel was established on the ruins of historic Palestine, a Russian Jewish Zionist leader, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, argued that a Jewish state in Palestine could only survive if it exists “behind an iron wall” of defense. Jabotinsky was speaking figuratively. However, future Zionist leaders, who embraced Jabotinsky’s teachings, eventually turned the principle of the iron wall into a[Read More…]
South Asia
Illusive unity and eroding the aspirations of the Tamils in Sri Lanka
There is no doubt that unity is the most uttered and much used and abused word by the Tamil politicians and leaders who took control of the political destiny of Tamils since independence in 1948. It is also a history that Tamil leaders and parties on various occasions moved to form united fronts like the Tamil United Liberation Front [TULF][Read More…]
Annihilate Caste
Conversation with Dr Manisha Bangar Part I
Phule-Ambedkarite ideology is the only alternative for Bahujans, says Dr Manisha Bangar, National Vice President, People’s Party of India, former National Vice President, BAMCEF in conversation with Vidya Bhushan Rawat Dr Manisha Bangar is a practicing Senior Consultant Gastroenterologist and Transplant Hepatologist, with around 20 years of clinical cum research and teaching experience. In terms of her medical qualification, she completed[Read More…]
Life/Philosophy
Tribute to Sushital Roy Chowdhury
Earlier this year on 13th March, we commemorated the 50th death anniversary of Comrade Sushital Roy Chowdhury,,who died in mysterious circumstances in 1971. Formally he is declared to have died out of heart attack. Few comrades as valiantly waged a crusade to confront left adventurism fostered by the C.P.I.(ML)led by Charu Mazumdar and establish the massline.Sadly even today sections of[Read More…]
Arts/Literature
A Story Poem about Climate Change
Is this climate change? I asked as rains lashed out. Oh, that is a subject for experts, the bald man with a goatee said. We stood on the clouds and watched the water slowly submerge — seeping through the marshes rising, rising till it covered the fields, the houses. The cattle — did they swim? The cats and dogs?[Read More…]
Book Review
Book on Bebo to be launched on her birthday
From Nazneen to Naina: 20 years of Kareena Kapoor Khan in Bollywood and what that means for India and the rest of the world, will be officially released at Chandigarh Press Club on Tuesday, September 21. Authored by Canadian journalist Gurpreet Singh, the book is based on the film career of the famous Bollywood diva, and what she has faced[Read More…]
