Farewell to Sasi etta, brother K.P....
Our beloved K.P.Sasi is no more. Filmmaker, cartoonist,...
Environment
Draft notification on Insecticides unsatisfactory
Dr Narasimha Reddy Donthi | 17/03/2023- 5 Surprising Things That Could Be Preventing Your Backyard From Serving as a Wildlife Sanctuary
Doug Tallamy | 07/03/2023 - Fish Killing Mania: Australia’s War Against the Common Carp
Dr Binoy Kampmark | 06/03/2023
Featured Stories
India
Indore Tragedy Re-emphasizes Need for Better Safety in Religious Places
36 persons were killed in a very tragic accident caused by the falling of roof slabs on worshippers who had collected for Ram Navmi prayers. 16 others have been admitted to hospital with injuries. The tragedy occurred at a step well located inside Baleshwar Mahadev Jhulelal temple in Indore. Many people fell inside the step well when slabs well on[Read More…]
COVID Response Watch
Shadow of Covid lingers over the erstwhile Kingdom of Cooch Behar
The princely state of Cooch Behar merged with the Dominion of India on August 8, 1949 and became a part of the State of West Bengal on January 1, 1950. To go to Cooch Behar, one has to cross Darjeeling and Jalpaiguri districts, which were also once part of other neighbouring hill kingdoms and annexed by the British. During my[Read More…]
World
U.S. Top General On U.S. Ammunition Stockpile And Prospect Of Ukraine Winning The War
U.S. Army General Mark Milley, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, has commented on problems in stockpile of U.S. ammunitions and prospect of Ukraine winning the war this year. An AP report — Milley: US has long way to go to build munitions stockpile” (March 30, 2023) — said: The U.S. military “has a long ways to go”[Read More…]
Globalisation
Corporatizing the World One Small Company at a Time
I remember when my small town lost its last family owned and run pharmacy — a beautiful, old, turn of the century store and a high quality company that the family had managed over four generations of pharmacists. In fact, the pharmacist-owners had loved their jobs and helped each other in work while simultaneously knowing most of their long-standing customers and[Read More…]
Human Rights
Stop the Witch-hunt of Journalists and Human Rights Activists in Kashmir
Release Irfan Mehraj, Khurram Parvez as well as Aasif Sultan, Sajad Gul, and Fahad Shah The PUCL strongly condemns the arrest of Irfan Mehraj, a Srinagar based freelance journalist under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) on 20th March, 2023 by the National Investigation Agency (NIA). The arrest of Irfan Mehraj was pursuant to an FIR registered in 2020, in[Read More…]
Imperialism
America’s Wars
Over 300 wars! As documented in the Wikipedia timeline of U.S. wars, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_military_operations and in the Wikipedia list of wars involving the United States, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_United_States the United States of America has been more or less continuously at war ever since the American Revolutionary war of 1775-1783, which established the United States as a nation. Often several wars took place simultaneously.[Read More…]
Communal Harmony
Scapegoats and Holy Cows: Crime and Justice Delivery System in the era of Sectarian Nationalism
In the case of Jamia violence of 2019, 11 students were arrested. One of them was Sharjeel Imam, who was student of JNU. The others included likes of Safoora Zargar and Asif Iqbal Tanha. While discharging them Court comments, “police was unable to apprehend “actual perpetrators” and “surely managed to rope them (accused) as scapegoats” in the matter.” Court also[Read More…]
Climate Change
The Truth About Our Failure to Curb Carbon Emissions
We all know what needs to be done: reduce carbon emissions. But so far, we members of global humanity just haven’t been able to turn the tide. The latest IPCC report documents that carbon emissions are still increasing, despite all the promises and efforts of the past few decades. The report tells us there’s only a narrow (and rapidly shrinking) pathway to[Read More…]
Environmental Protection
Draft notification on Insecticides unsatisfactory
To Joint Secretary (Plant Protection), Department of Agriculture, Cooperation and Farmers Welfare, Union Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, Govt of India, Krishi Bhawan, New Delhi-110 001. E Mail: jspp-dac@gov.in. Sub: Comments/ Suggestion on the Draft Insecticides (Prohibition) Order, 2023 Ref. : 1. Gazette Notification, No.:S.O 701(E), dated 2nd February, 2023 Gazette Notification, No.:S.O 1512(E) dated 18th May 2020 Gazette[Read More…]
Counter Solutions
How Indigenous Land Management Practices Are a Blueprint for Climate-Resilient Agriculture
As a rapidly warming world strains at the shortcomings in industrial farming, key lessons can be taken from Indigenous practices. Several Hollywood action films center around an impending apocalypse in the form of an asteroid on a collision course with Earth—a glaring metaphor for the real-world implications of a rapidly accelerating climate crisis. As this crisis unfolds before our very[Read More…]
Resource Crisis
The Project of Capital and the Project of the Proletariat in a time of World Crisis
ABSTRACT This is a response to the two sets of articles written by Sajai Jose on the Fourth Industrial Revolution and on the world’s and India’s hunger crisis. It is in two parts. In the first part it lays the historical background of the response of capital in the face of periodic crises it faces and people’s response to it.[Read More…]
Patriarchy
Men, masculinities, and gender equality
Both men and women are still imprisoned by patriarchy in the vast majority of our globe. Together, we inhabit a world of social logic where prejudice, injustice, and exploitation taint the relationships of concern, love, and respect between people, groups, and communities. From the streets to the workplace, patriarchy permeates even the most private areas of the house. All around[Read More…]
Palestine
Selective Outrage in Palestine: The Problem is Not Just Smotrich but Zionism
By his own admission, Israel’s new Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich is a “fascist homophobe”. This declaration, which he made on January 16, should be enough to accentuate the violent nature of the new political concoction created by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last December. Though Smotrich is not the only politician in Netanyahu’s cabinet with a track record of violence,[Read More…]
South Asia
Is Washington now Khan’s Buddy?
We all know that 95 percent of elite Pakistani politics is mentally challenged fairytales and gossip replete with murmurings that can be cooked up for a good story to sell to the public. The intrigues and power plays of Pakistan’s rulers seem to just drag the country further and further to the abyss. After virtually a year now of the[Read More…]
Annihilate Caste
Some thoughts on the ongoing debate around the tragic demise of Darshan Solanki
The recent death of the first year dalit undergraduate student, Darshan Solanki, has once again raised the question of the caste discrimination and related biases on the IITB campus. The institutions and support system that the Institute has built over the years in order to deal with the mental stress and the caste related discrimination have rightly come under the[Read More…]
Life/Philosophy
In memory of centenary of George Lukacs’s ‘History and Class Consciousness’
George Lukacs’s “History and Class Consciousness” is a truly landmark work, and its English translation, after almost fifty years of neglect by English and American publishers, was a major development. This year we commemorate 100 years of this work being published, in year 1923. Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat section of this work, published in 1923, is a[Read More…]
Arts/Literature
A doubtful American Invention
“I don’t understand why India looks up to the Oscars… Audience is my Oscar.” – Mira Nair, quoted in The Telegraph, Kolkata, December 1, 2012 On April 23, 1992, a man died. A tall man once blessed with broad shoulders, a headful of dark, well-set hair, and sharply chiseled features; a man who touched several art forms, enriching whatever he[Read More…]
Book Review
WWII & Holocaust Could Never Have Happened Without American Corporations Investing & Joint Venturing with Hitler’s Poor Nazi Germany – Chapter 2
Chapter 2 ‘Weaponizing Nazis’ Contribution made by American capitalism to German war preparations described as phenomenal and crucial to German military capabilities With the world of the plundering Colonial Powers deep in the chaos of the Great Depression, a disastrous failure of rule by the banks of the capitalist countries, the United States internally threatened by local organizations of socialists, communists,[Read More…]
