This was written a few days after the attack on Mumbai in November 2008. Trust the United States to be unfailingly hypocritical. Every time there is an attack on its Empire—ranging two occupied countries and over 700 military bases—it is those damn terrorists, nay, it is Al Qaeda. But in the aftermath of the horrendous…
*This post was part of ‘Men Say No’ Blogathon at www.mustbol.in/team-blog* 30 November, 2011 Gender-based violence is a reality across the world, though the precise forms it may take are varied. What is striking about India–and more specifically, Delhi– is the perceived impunity with which men engage in acts of violence outside of homes (where one would…
This is in response to Sagarika Ghose’s piece in the Hindustan Times, about the condition, ideas and aspirations of Gujarati Muslims ten years after the pogrom. Strangely, while much of the evidence presented in the article points to an extremely disturbing state of affairs, Ghose’s interpretation of what she witnesses—presumably while filming for her TV…
Published online here. The brutal murder of police officer Narendra Kumar Singh by minions of a mining mafia in the Morena District of Madhya Pradesh has brought the issue of mining and its entanglements with power firmly into the spotlight once more. In fact, barely a week passes before mining makes the headlines of Indian newspapers on matters…
Watching the Kony 2012 video I was reminded of an evening in mid-2006, when a fellow graduate student asked me to join her at the screening of a new documentary that was making waves across the US. I was known in my department as an activist type and was working on Africa, which is why I believe…
25 Februrary, 2012. It was the rainy season, which, in Central Africa means buckets of downpour almost every day, interspersed with spells of sapping heat. But no one in the town of Solwezi in Northwestern Zambia cared about the weather during those five days in January 2008, when their country played at football’s African Cup…
Published first on Bargad.org, 11 July, 2012 Gangs of Wasseypur (GoW) is a piece of cinema and it therefore must be critically appraised as such. Our guild of professional critics has already done so, and some have pronounced harsh verdicts on what they consider to be a ‘tedious’ film that is too heavily inspired by…
As a seeming majority of fellow travelers are calling for death to and/or torture of the perpetrators of the heinous gangrape in New Delhi, maintaining a steadfast opposition to these instruments is as difficult as it is important. The position against capital punishment is commonly believed to be on account of a misplaced defense of…
Rikshaa Republic 