“Whoever controls the information, controls the imagination.” –George Orwell “Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.” –Albert Einstein “Imagine there’s no countries… It isn’t hard to do…. Nothing to kill or die for…. And no religion too…. Imagine all the people… living life in peace” –John Lennon Preludes “’We hold these truths to be[Read More…]
By the lake’s lapping shore above the town and the railroad tracks, my wife and I stopped and marveled, struck stone silent by two dazzling Baltimore Orioles, clawed together as they tumbled, wrestling in the green morning breeze above our heads. They perched upon a branch and sang a morning hymn, an ode to joy and the spring’s morning glory. [Read More…]
One surmises that the volunteer military system devised after the Vietnam debacle erases what had transpired before. Perhaps we all need to revisit that terrible era, when phony US incursions overseas had such horrific repercussions… on foreign nations and on our young men. As a college student in the late 60s and early 70s I had the ‘ Get out[Read More…]
As a child, I would watch with trepidation-tinged excitement and fascination the conversation between one of my uncles and the long-haired, sickle-sword wielding “velichappaad” (oracle through whom a revered deity, mostly the Goddess Bhagavati, would speak). This is how the conversation would play out. The long-haired velichappaad, ritualistically adorned and armed (anklets, waist-belt with bells and a sickle-sword), whole body[Read More…]
Turn, turn any corner Hear, you must hear what the people say You know that somethin’ is goin’ on around here It surely, surely, surely won’t stand the light of day… no Speak out, you got to speak out against the madness You got to speak your mind, if you dare It’s been a long time comin’ It’s going to[Read More…]
“You don’t need religion to have morals. If you can’t determine right from wrong, then you lack empathy, not religion.” Anonymous This anonymous quote that I received as a forward and in turn forwarded to my friends, though seemingly clear, rational and reasonable is however susceptible to misunderstanding and misinterpretation. On reading the quote, religionists’ first instinct is[Read More…]
Long, long ago — a very clichéd way to start a narrative — but none the less, long ago, I remember there was a time when my grandfather would graft roses in his garden in Delhi. White and red were his favourite combination. Eventually, the roses would blend together to become a pink. Some would retain their shades distinctly, but[Read More…]
Despite its pedigree as a fundamental element in civilization’s greatest stories, nostalgia has come to be associated with treacly sentimentality, defeatism, and spurious spiritual inclinations. Homer, Vergil, Dante, the Biblical writers, and their ilk would demur, of course, but they have been dead for a few years, so progress’s mantra urges us to get on with it. This is now.[Read More…]
If we were to imagine our journey towards the 73rd Republic Day as a long, tiring and sometimes treacherous trek through the Himalayas, then looking back we can be proud that we managed to survive some dangerous terrain. The mountains were right at the beginning where we were air-dropped by the colonial powers, into the death-zone. The lack of adequate[Read More…]
It has taken my slow brain a long time to figure it out but finally, as 2021 comes to an end, I have found a sure shot way of bringing about a social and political revolution in India. A transformation that will sweep away Indian society’s deep caste and class inequalities, deepen democracy and end the venal politics of hatred[Read More…]
“Oddly enough, it (potato) was introduced to the Himalayas by two Irishmen, captain Young of Dehra and Mussoorie and captain Kennedy of Simla, in the 1820s. The slopes of Young’s house, ‘Mullinger’, were known as his Potato Farm. Looking up old books, I was surprised to learn that the potato wasn’t known in India before the nineteenth century, and now[Read More…]
“The President’s been shot!” he shouted, clamoring his way down the stairs in the dorm. The upper-classman! I was making my way to the third floor, and he was rushing down, letting our small world know—startled, young faces peeping from behind closed doors, aghast and in wonder. I got to my room, and my 2 freshman roommates were staring[Read More…]
“Vexilla regis prodeunt Inferni” – Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: The Inferno Try to look ahead and see if you can see what’s been coming for decades. Try to climb higher and see the beautiful things that Heaven bears, where we came forth, and once more see the stars and raise a banner of resistance to the King of Hell and[Read More…]
Where so many mainstream writers miss the mark is that whereas dispossession was a zero-sum game, these would-be settlers, mostly peasants, were fleeing feudalism at home. “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa[Read More…]
There was a time when time was time and space and speed had some human meaning, for people lived within the limits of the natural world of which they were a part. As Albert Camus said, “In our madness, we push back the eternal limits, and at once dark Furies swoop down upon us to destroy.” The destruction is now[Read More…]
A memoir is a sort of autobiography. You record only those things that have affected you. You don’t do any research for it, except occasionally to check a date or fact. You write what you remember. Our Home I was born in Mysore in 1943 and we moved to Indore in 1945. I left Indore to study electronics at IIT[Read More…]
“A house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability.” – Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space There is a vast and growing gulf between the world’s rich and poor. An obscene gulf. If we can read houses, they will confirm this. They offer a visible lesson in social class. Houses stand before us like books[Read More…]
It’s been raining incessantly for three days. It is a cool early morning in the beginning of July and I have just made a cup of coffee. Now an electrical power outage has occurred and so I am sitting in a rocking chair in the semi-darkness savoring my coffee and feeling thankful that I made it in time. I have[Read More…]
I wish to write a little on a couple of terms, one of which, Ground or Grounding Dimension, I learned from an essay by Larry Dossey, and the other, Floating World, came to me as a designation for America but which I now understand was formerly applied to the urban culture of Edo Japan. One of these terms implies connectedness,[Read More…]
“He who does not bellow the truth when he knows the truth makes himself the accomplice of liars and forgers.” CHARLES PEGUY – French Author (1873-1914). Looking Beyond the Erroneous Logic of Contemporary Professional Intellect and Political Leaderships Are we living in an era of false truth, feigned piety and alternate transient facts of human affairs? To answer a rational[Read More…]
The two figures strolled in the most relaxed manner, until they came upon what many up there call ‘ The Edge of Heaven’. They stood on the precipice and together peered down, below the ethers, through the stratosphere and then the clouds, until they could view the Earth. Jesus- Well my friend, isn’t that majestic, your domain? Lucifer- Yes indeed,[Read More…]
Of all visions accessible on this living Earth, no natural sight is more beautiful that a mother and child. If the mother and child are human (no matter of what race), they are beautiful. If mother and child are lion or tiger, horse, bison, swan, or mountain sheep, beautiful. If mother and child are bear, be they black or brown,[Read More…]
Let me tell you, divorce with kids is no fun. In most traditional divorces the dad goes off and the mom keeps the kids. Now, many will say that the mom then has it the worst, for she has to take care of them without a dad around to help. Everyone knows that it is the mom who has to[Read More…]
kitnaa hai badnasiib zafar dafan ke liye do gaz zamiin bhii na milii kuu-e-yaar men Exiled in Rangoon in the colonial British India, the last Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar wrote these lines, which expresses regret for the fact that he was not allowed a burial in his own beloved country. Used emblematically as the figurehead for the 1857 revolt,[Read More…]
“It has often been said that the only thing that could unite mankind was a threat from space.” I read this in Arthur C Clarke’s novel, 2061, Odyssey Three. The threat in Clarke’s science fiction was a second star — which mankind renamed Lucifer but was actually Jupiter set ablaze by superior space engineering by an intelligent species far more[Read More…]
Last night before dinner as I was deep-frying a batch of my favorite jalebi for dessert, Saroo Brierley’s face came to mind. Afterwards I found the 2016 movie Lion from my CD collection and watched it in bits and pieces. It tells a riveting story of how a hopelessly lost 5-year-old Saroo ends up from the slums of Khandwa, a[Read More…]
In our student days a large part of the year was consumed by three long spells of holidays. The year started after the Christmas vacations which were long, but not as long as the summer vacations in May-June. The Puja vacations were the shortest but in many ways the most exciting. Durga or Kali Puja in the small towns of[Read More…]
It’s better to stay away from poetics to present in prose someone who wrote in verse that his poems have no forewords, critical studies or words of adulation. My patron saint in this endeavour is Malayalam writer N S Madhavan, who dribbles with words when he writes on football,a style interspersed with quotes and blows of vuvuzela. One can take[Read More…]
“Compassion has no place in the natural order of the world, which operates on the basis of necessity. The laws of necessity are as unexceptional as the laws of gravitation. The human faculty of compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural. To forget oneself, however briefly, to identify with a stranger[Read More…]
These are all very Kolkatan in nature and you really won’t get to see or hear them in any other parts of the country. What? Some years back a national daily carried an interesting photograph in their ‘City Lights’ column. It said that at Bowbazar police station, some paintings of Pablo Picasso were replicated and some of the painter’s quotations[Read More…]
The India Tourism byline is – Incredible India. I agree. I encountered it. Here is what happened. In 2015, two dear friends of mine and I decided to go to Corbett National Park & Tiger Reserve – being one of my favorite places on earth. I am a lifelong wildlife enthusiast and photographer and ensure that I spend at least[Read More…]
I’ve come to realize that I don’t conform to ideas of any particular political party, religion, ideology and position in the way that others think the world or people should be or other positions should be. It is because I think and feel independently. Besides I was not indoctrinated by my parents or others. They let me be free. Yes,[Read More…]
In my “Putting the Decalogue Under a Microscope” I distinguished between “normative” and “empirical” statements relative to human behaviors. The latter are factual statements that pertain to either a given individual, or humans in general; the former are assertions as to what behaviors individuals should, or should not, engage in. Thus, although both types of statements pertain to human behaviors,[Read More…]
Diya Barmecha from Mumbai, proving that young minds are capable of thinking equally, if not better than older ones. A stunning essay on the life of a security guard, drawing out the discrimination inherent in society. This day was like any other. What else can you expect from the life of a security guard of a common building? Right on time, the[Read More…]
15 year old Abhipsha Mohanty leads us to this fairytale land of clean skies, green farms, beautiful fragrance in the air and a peaceful life.But all of this for real in her village in Odisha, which she points out is the 6th cleanest village in India. Here is a wonderful message of cleanliness. Mahatma Gandhi once said, “The soul of[Read More…]
When you’re 20, full of piss and vinegar, you can open up to so much. That was the year, 1970, when dreams seemed so real. This writer had just returned from a brief summer in Virginia Beach, Virginia. This was but the second time I ever was away from my parents’ apartment, and for that matter, Brooklyn, NY, lauded as[Read More…]
Cats came into Preeti’s life long before camels, around the time cows found a way out of her heart but into her life. She had seen cows ever since she could remember…while riding horse driven tongas in Haridwar in 1970s, creating traffic jams in Delhi, Haridwar, Kolkata, Dehradun, Lucknow and wherever she happened to visit in India. From long before[Read More…]
Did the caveman laugh? Did he have a toothache? The cheering thing for him would have been, he would not have to visit a dentist. Or, is that a cheering thought for me? And he would continue in pain while his tooth rotted and fell! And mine gets pulled out or repaired by a dentist peering into my numb anaesthetised[Read More…]
About ten years ago, a friend who hadn’t seen me in over two decades, offered me some tips as to what jewelry to wear to lunch when I meet one of my former editors of a Dhaka daily. He came to Maryland on business and to spend time with his family. I was a little nervous about the lunch meeting.[Read More…]
First the words; Eulogy: a speech or piece of writing that praises someone or something highly, especially a tribute to someone who has just died. Elegy: An elegy is a sad poem, usually written to praise and express sorrow for someone who is dead. But eulogies, Wikipedia assures me, can also be delivered at retirement functions and other such events when a person[Read More…]
Covid-19 did the impossible: it changed the concept of time as a finite resource. Type A individuals, like me, were faced with the realisation that we had time on our hands. Therefore, we just had to make it as productive as possible. It sounded like good news. Gone were the dreadful Mondays that spoiled all our Sundays, and along with[Read More…]
This morning when I pulled opened the curtains to my dining room window overlooking the neighborhood park, I spotted one of my neighbors (let me call her Lillete) is power walking in the park. She looked radiant and chic in her joggers outfit. She appeared much energized. Looking back a few months ago, I remembered last year’s Halloween night (October[Read More…]
It’s always darkest right before dawn. In this dark time, which is the most frightening experience for a lot of people, we must find our strength to go on. The Coronavirus pandemic is going to be over one day and we must try our hardest to make it. Many have been lost and many are fighting for their life.[Read More…]
Lockdown Series 5 As lock down moves to 50 days, there is a “new normal’ emerging. Human beings have the amazing and scary capacity to adapt and endure in myriad ways to crisis and tribulations maintaining the minimum “ business as usual” attitudes”. The days of lock down and Corona scare have brought out this fortitude and coping strategies of[Read More…]
Jamal Uddin had lived an ordinary and extraordinary life at the same time. His life story is about hard work, determination, and resilience in living the life of an immigrant in New York City. “Mr. Uddin was born in Chittagong, Bangladesh, where the Karnaphuli River flows into the Bay of Bengal. He was not poor, but he knew what it[Read More…]
Forget GDP growth, it’s sustainable wellbeing we need to aim for 
Supremes Declare War on Wetlands 
Kings Coronation, Victory Day Parade and Perverse Values 
A critical approach to the exploration of Identity & Violence: An attempt by the young researchers of EDRU 
Delay in Census enumeration, unreliable death registration and fake Aadhaar cards adversely impact integrity of elections, leads to misuse of public funds 
Special Significance of the Next Decade in Human History, and a Campaign Linked to This 
Prophets of Doom: Kissinger and the ‘Intellectual’ Decline of the West 
“Free Trade” as Revealed in the China-United States Paradigm 
Memorialize USA Lies About Each Mistaken Undeclared War Americans Remembered Today Gave Their Lives 
Tipu Sultan: Fallacies and Facts around the Historical Figure in India 
The intertwined history of caste and census in India 
A Tale of Two Indias 
Dismantle the structures of sexual violence, NOT the protesters’ tent! 
CDRO condemns the manhandling of the protesting wrestlers 
From Deathly Silence to Violence: The journey of Wrestlers struggling for Justice 
Workers Protests break out in China 
Now I Am Ravana’s Head 
Noam Chomsky on Why This Is the Most Dangerous Point in Human History 
HAK Birthdays: Henry Kissinger Turns 100 
Brotherhood and Friendship in a time of War- Reflections on The Mercenary, by Jeffrey E. Stern 
Weaknesses of the National Security Strategy 2022 – Part 8: The NSS falsely claims that Russia and Putin have malicious goals and spurn negotiation 
What role did trade unions play in the struggle for independence in Kenya? 
The plight of Meitei Pangals or Manipur Muslims remains unheard 
A Timely Warning on Avoiding the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework that Deserves Wide Attention 
Tinsel Gods 
Kirti Kisan Union conducts massive rally in Moga on issue of Canal Water 
The Importance of Convenient Payment Options in Enhancing Travel Experiences 
Book Review – A Reader on Financial Inclusion 
Nuclear Turns Fashionable 
Taiwan’s Quest to Upgrade Its Battle Readiness Continues to Evolve 
Trade Unions in Kenya and Britain in a Changing World 
Why Phalke Award Has Eluded Classic Hindi Cinema Heroines 
Modi in Australia: Down Under Bliss for Hindutva 
Both Blocs Behind Iron Curtain? 
Demand for scrapping of iron fortified rice distribution in India’s public food schemes intensifies 
Government destroying public spaces rather than protecting them 
Dalit agricultural labour organisations stage protests in Punjab 
The Influence of Higher Wages and Better Job Opportunities on Migration from Small Towns to Big Cities or Other Regions New Parliament building- Appearance Vs Substance 
International body slams Media Repression in Kashmir During G-20 Event 
Our beloved K.P.Sasi is no more. Filmmaker, cartoonist, writer, mentor, friend and above all tireless activist championing the cause of every underdog, Sasi breathed his last, mid-afternoon this Christmas day – after battling a medical condition for months. I remember the last time I met him, almost exactly a month before he passed away, at the ayurvedic healing center in[Read More…]
