Shiv Visvanathan

What sustains us as a society is four ideas or four truths. These are Bollywood, cricket, science and democracy. All four have failed us in Covid times.

Schools should attempt to teach futurology, bringing a new sensitivity about time, a playfulness about prediction and change, and a trusteeship for the rights of future generations.

The real casualty of the Covid seems to be the newspaper. A sense of tragedy is lost in the celebration of the technological.

We see man as the centre and controller of the earth, without realising the earth can do without us.

The virus seems to be both a literary and scientific disaster which we need to re-read and invent in the years to come.

It is not just that Scindia’s role is badly enacted but the silence of other Congress leaders is also frustrating. Even Rahul or Sonia or the CM could do with a few more lines of explanation.

Civil society has to respond, rise to the occasion inventively and to respond to a regime that does not understand the spirit of the preamble.

Democracy as protest creates ambush and lethal surprises which warns regimes that democracy never lets politics to be taken for granted.

The protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act ambushed the government and surprised India.

It is a time where the government that has been pontificating for years, gets a lesson in politics. For all its brutality, the government is speechless.

A new generation of student leaders objected to the exclusion of Muslims from the CAA. They were a new citizenry showing empathy and cosmopolitanism that the BJP does not comprehend.

Many scientists do not equate scientific concern with national interest.

In accepting to be under RTI, the court is virtually telling the citizen, RTI brings along with it the burden of citizenship as interpretation.

The BJP targeted Rahul Gandhi as a symptom of dynastic politics, but it has little to say about the Chautalas, the Pawars or the Reddys.

Once Gandhi is read as a scientist who used his body as an eternal test tube, the idea of satyagraha acquires a different kind of vitality.

One senses that irony and authoritarianism go hand in hand. It is a story to be recounted years from now as part of the anecdotes of authoritarianism.

Tabrez is much more than a statistic of mob lynching. We need to individualize his story, go into each detail of the incident and hold the perpetrators responsible.

Several people have been making a mockery out of the way liberals reacted to Modi’s victory. Much of it is based on how the media covered it.

Any idea of India must contain its sense of China and Pakistan. Only with such a scenario can we survive in peace and confidence.

Kohli's aggression, competence never quite conveys the sense of sportsmanship that Dravid communicates.

The dynamics of politics controlled by the media and party have little space for issues which take time and have complex narratives.

The need of the hour is to return to the fundamentals, not fundamentalism.

Few have read classics beyond the compulsory reading at schools. Almost none can recite a major poem or quote from a classic play.

We owe to his memory not rote repetition but inventiveness because Gandhi was one of the great inventors of the century.

A walk along a Chennai beach made me realise that the sea is not a resource, it is a way of life.

As the waters recede and the reality of reconstruction dawns, quick solutions need to be avoided.

It is not merely individual choice, but the availability of plural worlds and alternatives.

At one time, the country had the folklore, the myths, of coping with the outsider. Our culture was open and plural, but today he is seen as a threat.

My college students do not know how to read a book. They insist on a summary or ask for power points.

After many a riot, the Muslim as citizen is still atoning for the alleged sins of his ancestors.