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.
...Full StorySchools 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.
...Full StoryThe real casualty of the Covid seems to be the newspaper. A sense of tragedy is lost in the celebration of the technological.
...Full StoryWe see man as the centre and controller of the earth, without realising the earth can do without us.
...Full StoryThe virus seems to be both a literary and scientific disaster which we need to re-read and invent in the years to come.
...Full StoryIt 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.
...Full StoryCivil society has to respond, rise to the occasion inventively and to respond to a regime that does not understand the spirit of the preamble.
...Full StoryDemocracy as protest creates ambush and lethal surprises which warns regimes that democracy never lets politics to be taken for granted.
...Full StoryThe protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act ambushed the government and surprised India.
...Full StoryIt 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.
...Full StoryA 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.
...Full StoryMany scientists do not equate scientific concern with national interest.
...Full StoryIn accepting to be under RTI, the court is virtually telling the citizen, RTI brings along with it the burden of citizenship as interpretation.
...Full StoryThe BJP targeted Rahul Gandhi as a symptom of dynastic politics, but it has little to say about the Chautalas, the Pawars or the Reddys.
...Full StoryOnce 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.
...Full StoryOne 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.
...Full StoryTabrez 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.
...Full StorySeveral 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.
...Full StoryAny idea of India must contain its sense of China and Pakistan. Only with such a scenario can we survive in peace and confidence.
...Full StoryKohli's aggression, competence never quite conveys the sense of sportsmanship that Dravid communicates.
...Full StoryThe dynamics of politics controlled by the media and party have little space for issues which take time and have complex narratives.
...Full StoryThe need of the hour is to return to the fundamentals, not fundamentalism.
...Full StoryFew have read classics beyond the compulsory reading at schools. Almost none can recite a major poem or quote from a classic play.
...Full StoryWe owe to his memory not rote repetition but inventiveness because Gandhi was one of the great inventors of the century.
...Full StoryA walk along a Chennai beach made me realise that the sea is not a resource, it is a way of life.
...Full StoryAs the waters recede and the reality of reconstruction dawns, quick solutions need to be avoided.
...Full StoryIt is not merely individual choice, but the availability of plural worlds and alternatives.
...Full StoryAt 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.
...Full StoryMy college students do not know how to read a book. They insist on a summary or ask for power points.
...Full StoryAfter many a riot, the Muslim as citizen is still atoning for the alleged sins of his ancestors.
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