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World
World Food Day: A Wholistic World Food Policy is Needed
Since the hungry billion in the world community believe that we can all eat if we set our common house in order, they believe also that it is unjust that some men die because it is too much trouble to arrange for them to live. Stringfellow Barr Citizens of the World (1954) The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (2015-2030) aims[Read More…]
India
Wake Up, India: Essays for Our Times-Restating what India is and who an Indian is
The common man/woman knows India is struggling over simple issues. We need clean air and no pollution, we have water problems, we all need food, shelter and clothing as well as proper jobs, good education, good medical care and leisure, families, old age care, care for the disabled etc., plus electricity, good travel facilites, technology like the internet and phones,[Read More…]
Globalisation
Feminists Denounce the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Traditional Balinese Ritual
Bali, Indonesia: At sunset yesterday, over 50 women’s groups, grassroots communities, farmers and workers groups from across Asia gathered at the Padang Galak Beach in Bali, Indonesia to denounce the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) in a sacred Balinese ritual named Tolak Bala. During the ritual, women from the communities impacted by World Bank-funded projects and IMF policies warded[Read More…]
Human Rights
Turkey plays Khashoggi crisis to its geopolitical advantage
With Turkish investigators asserting that they have found further evidence that Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was killed when he visited the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul two weeks ago, Turkey appears to be leveraging the case to enhance its position as a leader of the Islamic World and reposition itself as a key US ally. To enhance its geopolitical position vis[Read More…]
Imperialism
The US-Led Genocide and Destruction of Yemen
Photo: WhatsuPic, “Expanded War, Hunger, Disease, Death i n Yemen, No Big DEal to US” “Only God can save our children”, say Yemeni fathers and mothers as they can do nothing but watch their children die, try to comfort them in their final agonizing hours, and pray for God to spare them from death. The fathers and mothers watch and pray, as one[Read More…]
Communal Harmony
Hindutva Poses the Greatest Threat to Women
India is today standing on a precipice, staring at the grave danger of plunging into an ideology that threatens every single citizen. It threatens not just the minorities and the Hindu-oppressed lower castes but the majority of its citizens, the women. Both the ideology and the many pronouncements of leaders of RSS and its many affiliates, confirm that women[Read More…]
Climate Change
The IPCC Report: Is There Hope For Our Planet?
Hurricanes and storms on both sides of the Atlantic appeared to encore the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change. It had just concluded the finalization of a special report on the impact of a 1.5 degree Celsius global warming above preindustrial levels. Meeting in Incheon, South Korea (October 1-5), its three working groups of experts and government officials have huddled and jousted to[Read More…]
Environmental Protection
Climate-Driven ‘Bugpocalypse’
When a scientist who studies the essential role insects play in the health of the ecosystem calls a new study on the dramatic decline of bug populations around the world “one of the most disturbing articles” he’s ever read, it’s time for the world to pay attention. The article in question is a report published Monday in the Proceedings of the National[Read More…]
Counter Solutions
Initiation into a Living Planet
Most people have passed through some kind of initiation in life. By that, I mean a crisis that defies what you knew and what you were. From the rubble of the ensuing collapse, a new self is born into a new world. Societies can also pass through an initiation. That is what climate change poses to the present global civilization.[Read More…]
Resource Crisis
Why Economists Can’t Understand Complex Systems: The case of William Nordhaus, Nobel Prize in Economics
After having been awarded the Nobel prize in economics of this year, William Nordhaus has been often presented as some sort of an ecologist (see, e.g. this article on Forbes). Surely, Nordhaus’ work on climate has merit and he is one of the leading world economists who recognize the importance of the problem and who propose remedies for it. On the[Read More…]
Alternative Energy
Can New Energy Technologies Save the Planet? Ask the Sperm Whale
An oilman, a green techie and a sperm whale walked into a bar. They got to drinking and, inevitably, boasting. The oilman looked at the whale and declared that if it hadn’t been for fossil fuels, all 75 species of whales would have been hunted to extinction for oil. “My industry and its technology saved your large ass.” The greenie[Read More…]
Patriarchy
#TheyToo
The persistence of ‘Me Too’ as used by Tarana Burke in 2006, was to endow women through empathy, mainly young and helpless women. In October 2017, Alyssa Milano refreshed using the catchphrase as a #tagMeToo, to help reveal the extent of problems with sexual harassment and assault by displayinghow many people have faced these events by themselves.Several #tags about sharing stories of[Read More…]
Palestine
Unbridled Power
The power I am speaking of is that of the Zionist occupiers of our land who will not stop at anything to wipe every Palestinian off the face of this earth and erase every semblance of Palestinian life and culture of our ancestral home. This savage power has been enabled and empowered throughout the last century by various western powers,[Read More…]
Kashmir
Kashmir: Shuffling the Administration
(For past some time the officers in the state administration are being shuffled like a pack of cards which renders them ineffective) Apart from various political and security issues, the State of Jammu & Kashmir is bedevilled by lack of governance and unresponsive administration. Both the issuers emanate from the virtual absence of accountability which is a direct offshoot of[Read More…]
South Asia
Pakistani poker: Playing Saudi Arabia against China
Desperate for funding to fend off a financial crisis fuelled in part by mounting debt to China, Pakistan is playing a complicated game of poker that could hand Saudi Arabia a strategic victory in its bitter feud with Iran at the People’s Republic’s expense. The Pakistani moves threaten a key leg of the USD60 billion plus Chinese investment in the[Read More…]
Annihilate Caste
A Call To Shudra/OBC/SC/STs To Celebrate October 5 As Indian English Day
I appeal to all the Shudra/OBC/SC/STs to celebrate the Indian English Day on 5 October, 2018 as we have no significant place in the world of English even after 201 years of English education in India. The first ever Indian English school was started in 1817 in October by William Carey and Rajram Mohan Roy. But the Shudra/OBC/SC/STs are excluded[Read More…]
Life/Philosophy
Gandhi: The Great Dissenter
India is losing the great tradition of ‘spirit of inquiry and dissent’ which we cherished in the past as the progressive history of cultural tolerance and harmony. In today’s India, the political parties in power and opposition are eyeing human individuals as potential voters and trying to woo them by spreading untruths and rumors. Indian society by and large needs[Read More…]
Arts/Literature
Orson Welles, Broadcasts and Fake News
Orson Welles’ spectral return to the screen, ingeniously in posthumous mode, should have come as a comfort to the magicians skilled in the arts of trickery. Beyond the grave, he seems to be exerting a continuing influence, with his film, The Other Side of the Wind making its debut after 48 torrid years at the Telluride Film Festival. His delight[Read More…]
Book Review
‘Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century’ – A Review
Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century by John Smith, Monthly Review Press, 2016. Even in the days of Brexit and Donald Trump, the dominant theme of the corporate media remains that the rising tide of ‘globalisation’ will lift all boats. Some go so far as to claim that the UK and the US are not for globalisation because it favours the developing nations.[Read More…]
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