SHARE        Tuesday, December 17, 2013
Article 377 of the Indian Penal Code and "The Love that Dare not Speak its Name" The homophobia of the once colonized nations is about lack of imagination in individuals occupying positions of power and the concomitant mediocrity of institutions that are a legacy of a colonial past.

SHARE        Tuesday, July 10, 2012
Book Review: Norman G. Finkelstein's "What Gandhi says about Nonviolence, Resistance and Courage" An honest academic and a serious activist, Norman G. Finkelstein has few illusions about Gandhi or Gandhism. What Finkelstein looks at is Gandhi the person and Gandhi the social and political activist along with the problems associated with Gandhian methods of protest.

(4 comments) SHARE        Friday, June 5, 2015
Government of India versus the Ambedkar Periyar Study Circle This might be a remarkably brief synopsis of the incident: however, the fact remains that the Ambedkar-Periyar Study Circle (APSC), a student association was derecognized by the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, Madras through a mail dated May 22, 2015 for allegedly creating "hatred" of the Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the "Hindus."

(13 comments) SHARE        Saturday, March 7, 2015
Lynching the "Rapist": a horror greater than the Rape I couldn't believe how happy the mob of mostly young men in Dimapur, Nagaland looked in their euphoria celebrating the lynching of an alleged rapist who also happens to be migrant labor from another state of India.

(1 comments) SHARE        Saturday, September 19, 2015
Why the late President APJ Abdul Kalam never made an impression on me In my view, Abdul Kalam was neither a phenomenal scientist nor an effectual leader. My own feeling is that he may have been indifferent to the economic dimension of social reality like most engineers, doctors and scientists who do not subscribe to the view that conscience is about responding to the plight of the weak and the downtrodden.

SHARE        Sunday, April 12, 2015
Reflections on Cuba: from Communism to Consumerism I began writing this short piece on Cuba in December 2012 after I returned home following a conference at the University of Havana. For some reason I took a long time to develop the argument, but, fundamentally, I remain convinced now, as I was then, that Cuba is the new consumer haven for American goods.

SHARE        Wednesday, December 27, 2017
Have a Nice Day in a Post-Joke World I want to touch on one episode from the 16th Season of Family Guy with the title "The D in Apartment 23" about Brian's racist tweet which I found interesting for its take on political correctness. Political correctness is a disease that unfortunately is connected to Internet-related developments which created a parallel social world other than the ones where people actually meet and discuss in day to day life.

(10 comments) SHARE        Saturday, September 16, 2017
On being Definitionally Challenged People who tend to use language without telling us what parameters they associate with the words they use, I have decided to call them "definitionally challenged"... to these abusers of language I have only one thing to say: read Rumi, Shakespeare and Wittgenstein.

(7 comments) SHARE        Saturday, December 21, 2013
An American System, "Alien" to the Indian Mindset This article is a reflection on the politics surrounding the arrest and body search of Ms. Devyani Khobragade an Indian consular officer in the US leading to a diplomatic row between India and the US -- at least from the Indian point of view.

(1 comments) SHARE        Sunday, August 21, 2011
Anna Hazare: a cup of tea in a storm Who is Anna Hazare fighting exactly if the very people who are India's enemies - the moneyed classes - are his back-end supporters!

(15 comments) SHARE        Monday, January 12, 2015
Pourquoi Je ne suis pas Charlie Hebdo The Charlie Hebdo tragedy is a thinly disguised parody of what used to be the "white man's burden" in the heydays of colonialism. It is therefore racist too by extension, a racism hiding behind discourses such as free speech within the "comfort zone" of western democracy.

(18 comments) SHARE        Saturday, May 31, 2014
What has meritocracy to do with merit? Meritocracy is another way of globalizing caste system by creating a system of social stratification separating the inferior from the superior. It is a way of making sure that the downtrodden, apart from the token few, never aspire to what by virtue of the system will go to those who inherit both wealth and power.

(1 comments) SHARE        Monday, February 26, 2018
The Politics of India's PM, Narendra Modi Narendra Modi's formula for an "exam warrior" in politics has been unbelievably simple: communalize the masses and corporatize the government. Almost every social group has begun to adopt reactionary positions either as supporters or as opponents of Modi and his policies. India as a nation has never been as polarized along communal lines as it is now since the

SHARE        Monday, April 6, 2015
By birth Indian, by culture Hindu, and by faith Christian The fears of Christian minorities in India are legitimate given the fact that there is a history of attacks on minorities through the use of mobs that would justify the fear. To dismiss those fears as imaginary as is being done by official media is seriously problematic and will not resolve issues at the ground level.

(2 comments) SHARE        Sunday, May 22, 2011
American Morality and the Strauss-Kahn Affair There is no reason on earth to treat Strauss-Kahn as if he is already a criminal. There is no reason to treat a criminal either as if he is not a human being.

(5 comments) SHARE        Tuesday, May 20, 2014
Annihilation of Casteist Mindset This is not a book review as such but a reflection on few aspects of the speech "Annihilation of Caste" by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar written to be presented in 1936 at the invitation of an anti-caste association in Lahore. There is nothing like caste as an unchanging category. Slavery was once upon a time a reality. What made it real was that there was something called the slave mentality and likewise a master mentality.

(1 comments) SHARE        Sunday, May 18, 2014
What the Narendra Modi-led BJP regime means to the future of India As the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi will write the obituary to the Nehruvian vision of a mixed economy that combined public enterprise with private initiative. In fact what this electoral victory might signify is the corporatization of the state where merit and conformism to the political order become the primary criteria for the ideal citizen.

(3 comments) SHARE        Monday, December 16, 2013
Expressing solidarity with the workers who rioted in Singapore's "Little India" This article is an expression of support for the workers who rioted in Singapore which I strongly contend is an expression of their discontent with terrible exploitation of cheap labor, a problem which needs to be addressed on a global platform.

SHARE        Saturday, February 24, 2018
God's own Country, Kerala, where God is fast asleep The pictures of the poor mentally challenged tribal man from Kerala who was lynched for supposedly stealing rice are haunting to say the least. That look of utter vulnerability written all over his body tells us the story of human injustice and human suffering in the same breath.

(17 comments) SHARE        Thursday, June 25, 2015
Putting the Charleston Church Shooting in Perspective I personally don't think that these are ideologically motivated murders. On the contrary they are rooted in a social structure that has already categorized certain individuals as outsiders -- and someone as young as Dylann Roof merely needs a cause to enroll as an insider. In that sense Roof's mindset is not fundamentally different from that of the youth who are fighting for the ISIS in the Levant.

SHARE        Friday, July 17, 2015
The vindictive and unfair sentencing of Oskar Groening The sentencing of Oskar Groening, the so-called "book-keeper of Auschwitz" to four years in prison is a stupid, cruel and inhuman judgment that will result in increasing the feelings of anti-semitism and xenophobia rather than doing justice to the victims of Nazism.

(3 comments) SHARE        Wednesday, June 7, 2017
Why the ISIS is winning in Europe In the brutal war in Syria and in Iraq where either you murder or you get murdered it is most likely that the ISIS is losing the war on the ground, which may be one good reason why they are determined to prove their newsworthiness in Europe or the US. ISIS needs propaganda to achieve its goals as much as the west does to defeat them.

SHARE        Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Why we need a Patriotic and not a Nationalist Media I'm exploring the Orwellian distinction between nationalism and patriotism and why I think more and more global media espouses nationalism which is vicious by nature rather than patriotism which is closer to what common people really are and wish to be.

(1 comments) SHARE        Friday, March 23, 2018
Why Indians are obsessed with the private lives of actors It's unbelievable how much interest Indians take in the private lives of actors. The context of course to what I am saying is the recent, unfortunate death of the actress Sridevi, perhaps one of the most popular women actors ever on the Indian screen.

(1 comments) SHARE        Friday, September 30, 2016
The Writing on the Kashmiri Wall The writing on the Kashmiri wall is obvious to those who have eyes to see: either we create an inclusive order that is willing to accommodate the aspirations of the common people of Kashmir or we end up buying the loyalty of the elites with the Indian tax-payer's money and becoming brutally repressive with the masses in the way Israel operates while dealing with the Palestinian Territories.

(2 comments) SHARE        Sunday, December 7, 2014
A View From India: Ferguson and Aftermath: A Bit too Black or White The way the discourse has been shaped right from the very beginning was on preconceived terms. It began with a minority black "law-breaker" and an armed white law-enforcer backed by a powerful racist state and continues in the same vein. That's what I find problematic.

SHARE        Friday, September 7, 2012
Book Review: Twilight of the Elites: America after Meritocracy Chris Hayes dismantles the myths of meritocracy: The book "Twilight of the Elites: America after Meritocracy" is written with a certain passion as if in response to the need of a time -- " the increasing inequality, compartmentalization, and stratification of America in the post-meritocratic age" (212).

(2 comments) SHARE        Monday, April 23, 2018
What women need are social equality and economic justice and not just more laws Gender issues are connected to social and economic justice and not merely about having more laws to punish violators. Legal empowerment is the tip of the iceberg and the easiest in my view because then nobody needs to do anything.

(2 comments) SHARE        Sunday, December 30, 2012
Patriarchy, the Social Order and the Delhi Gangrape Victim The twenty-three year old victim of brutal gang-rape on a New Delhi bus finally succumbed in a Singapore hospital following a period of physical and mental devastation -- a devastation that needs a different kind of imagination for it to be properly understood. The legitimization of violence in a country like India is an altogether different thing.

(1 comments) SHARE        Wednesday, January 22, 2014
Arvind Kejriwal and his loony bin politics The Aam Aadmi Party and its leader Kejriwal are anything but a serious reflection of the aspirations of the downtrodden masses. The recent mistreatment of black African women in Delhi by the law minister of the party actually establishes the racist and casteist nature of AAP politics.

SHARE        Wednesday, November 30, 2016
The Myth of a Cashless Society I wonder if PM Narendra Modi understands the gravity of the disaster unleashed on the poor masses thanks to the overnight project of demonetization. The ex-PM Manmohan Singh is right in calling it "organized loot" and "legalized plunder" except that the neo-liberal economic reforms which turned loot and plunder into virtues were initiated when Mr. Singh began his term as the Minister of Finance in 1991.

(1 comments) SHARE        Friday, September 21, 2012
Why Muslims need to embrace a Politics of Moderation It is as imperative for Muslims to embrace the politics of moderation as it is for the western governments and media to open space to the voices of moderate Muslims and give them an opportunity to be leaders in their communities.

(4 comments) SHARE        Thursday, January 2, 2014
Some hard-hitting questions to the so-called leftists of my country These are few questions I have to the leftists of my country who have reduced social and political change to an extension of their private selves rather than the other way round.

SHARE        Saturday, April 14, 2018
Horrific Images of BJP-misrule of India The 18-year old girl raped by the brothers, one of them a member of the ruling party in power and the gruesome rape and murder of the 8-year old in Jammu and Kashmir are images of BJP-misrule of India.

SHARE        Tuesday, August 16, 2011
UK Riots 2011 -- A "Social Revolution" Yet to Take Place Both the Norway attacks and UK disturbances are expressions of individual and collective bitterness and hatred towards a non-responsive and indifferent government that does not hesitate in using violence against them to keep a semblance of order.

SHARE        Sunday, November 1, 2015
Why Art need not be "Subversive" to bring about Social Change I am responding to the article by the Indian film actor Ms. Nandita Das which makes the statement that, "If art was not subversive, conservatives would not feel threatened." In my view, Shakespeare and Dostoevsky are anything but subversive in the sense in which Nandita Das uses the term "subversive."

SHARE        Monday, December 28, 2015
Defending the imprisoned Delhi University professor, G. N. Saibaba on Ethical Grounds A seriously concerned government ought to realize that the issues the Delhi University professor Dr. Saibaba talks about in relation to the rights of the tribals and the Dalits are not unfounded and it is morally indefensible for a government to prevent someone from talking about them.

SHARE        Sunday, March 13, 2016
What it means being Indian Each group of people imagines a characteristic or a set of traits that they feel intrinsically defines who they are. That makes Indianness fundamentally not so different from Pakistanness or Nepalness or Americanness

SHARE        Tuesday, February 2, 2016
Universities are Superstructures, not the Substructure of Society The suicide of a Dalit student at the University of Hyderabad,India and the politics surrounding the response that the suicide generated. The role that students play as a pressure group, or rather as a lobby, in their "compulsory revolutionary service."

(2 comments) SHARE        Sunday, August 19, 2012
Ecuador and Julian Assange's Asylum A nation honors itself through acts such as this one that Ecuador did in granting asylum to Julian Assange. The importance of Ecuador standing up to the UK government's intimidatory stance can hardly be ignored. It is not the same thing when a powerful nation dictates terms to those it views as inferiors and when the "inferiors" turn back to answer their so-called bosses.

SHARE        Wednesday, March 26, 2014
To the migrant workers who died in Qatar building infrastructure for the 2022 World Cup (Poem) This is a short poem on the death of migrant workers who died in Qatar "building the infrastructure for the 2022 World Cup." They are the real victims of globalization and outsiders to the so-called radical innovations of the modern world.

SHARE        Monday, March 7, 2011
Pakistan -- where fanaticism is a virtue The state of Pakistan as a nation and why it is imperative for them to come out of the death-like grip of the fanatics.

SHARE        Thursday, November 12, 2015
When students turn into trade unionists Truthfulness and commitment to change are alien words in politics. For an intellectual they are sacred words. While I see Machiavellian behavior defining student politics, I wish that more of them would invest the same energy in thinking clearly and articulate for greater accommodation and inclusion of the weak and vulnerable sections into mainstream society.

SHARE        Wednesday, February 17, 2016
Lives Matter: Black or White When I read about "Black Lives Matter," the question that came to mind was: shouldn't they matter! And it wasn't a rhetorical response. The next question that came to mind was: do other lives, whether white or not-so-white, Jew or Arab, ought to matter as much as black lives! Yes, they do! Black lives do matter. Black lives should matter, but, more importantly, black lives also matter, as do other lives.

SHARE        Thursday, March 3, 2011
Once upon a Time there was a Dog Called Hosni The Hosni Mubarak types and Third World Poverty

SHARE        Sunday, February 27, 2011
Why South Asia needs an Egyptian-Style Revolution? The nations of South Asia are as much in need of an Egyptian Revolution as any nation of the Arab World. It is the South Asian poor for whom the revolution is genuinely meaningful.

SHARE        Saturday, April 9, 2016
What I think of Student Nationalists from the National Institute of Technology, Kashmir Wearing a badge of nationalism has never been a serious indication that someone loves their country. Those who love their country feel with its downtrodden classes and its oppressed women and children. They are not blind with hatred that destroys the soul. They think of innovative ways to make life meaningful for everyone who comes in contact with them especially those who are ostracized or without a home.

SHARE        Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Internet Pirates! Unite! You've nothing to lose... Why I justify Internet Piracy? For the simple reason that knowledge cannot be reduced to private ownership. Internet piracy is one way to challenge the ownership theory of knowledge.

(1 comments) SHARE        Thursday, July 17, 2014
"Eyeless" in Gaza I wrote this article, with a change in few words, some years ago when Israel had done something similar to what it is doing today to Gaza. Strangely I realized that nothing fundamentally changed. This is only to emphasize the pathetic condition of the Palestinians under colonial occupation. "The Palestinians must defy the Israelis and live their freedom not as a possibility but as a reality."

SHARE        Friday, November 20, 2015
ISIS: "Rationalizing" an Invisible Enemy In politics it is important to see your enemy as a rational person making rational choices and with the full consciousness of someone who knows what he is doing. The ISIS can be extremely rational in the way it operates while at the same time dedicate its rationalism to the most irrational of goals.

SHARE        Sunday, October 31, 2010
Beware the Stone-throwers of Kashmir who Have Nothing to Lose Platforms are meant for those who struggle on the ground. The job of intellectuals is to make space for them and not to appoint oneself as their spokesperson. I for one would sincerely like to talk to the stone-throwers and their families.

SHARE        Monday, November 1, 2010
Beware the stone-throwers of Kashmir who have nothing to lose Platforms are meant for those who struggle on the ground. The job of intellectuals is to make space for them and not to appoint oneself as their spokesperson. I for one would sincerely like to talk to the stone-throwers and their families.