Tag: Politics

Done deal. Photo by Minh Pham/Unsplash The Tatas have not yet made it clear if they are staying put or going from Singur. After Sunday’s ‘rapprochement’ between the West Bengal government and the Mamata Banerjee-led agitators, it seems that the Tatas will have to let go of a few hundred acres from the Tata Nano factory premises. But the 300-odd acres of land to be doled out to farmers who are against selling their land has turned out…

The search is on There is hardly a new thing that can be said about the Indo-US nuclear deal. But the deal has shown new sides to those public figures whom we thought we knew well. Here they are, looked at through the post-nuclear deal tamasha glass: Manmohan Singh: After years of playing dumb -(or, at least, mumble) charades with both the Congress President and the Indian people, ‘I’m-a- Man’ Manmohan has suddenly received a double shot of adrenaline, which ought to…

Switched off. Photo by Yogesh Pedamkar/Unsplash The word ‘power’ has evolved into two disparate but related meanings. The more banal of the two refers to the production and distribution of energy for industrial and domestic use. The other meaning, the favourite object of inquiry of philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault, refers to a complex mechanism by which authority is applied to help sustain predominance and strategies of exploitation. But the application of the second…

It was the summer of 1956. No one outside the Eastern bloc had much of an idea of what exactly was going on inside the Soviet Union. The superpower was hidden from the Western gaze by the Iron Curtain. And it had to be checked out. With the help of lots of luck and some totalitarian whimsy, two Parisian journalists — Dominique Lapierre and his colleague and photographer Jean-Pierre Pedrazzini — got permission to travel to the heart of Soviet…

All lines are drawn. Photo by Adrien Bruneau on Unsplash There has not been a time in Bengal’s history, at least in recent memory, like the past two months. The death of young Rizwanur, the violence in Nandigram, the sudden riots against granting residency to Taslima Nasreen — all have created a vortex of socio-political reactions that seem to have shaken up the arrogance of the ruling CPM and mobilised the crowds. One significant fallout of Bengal’s autumn…

Saskia Sassen, Helen and Robert Lynd Professor of Sociology, Columbia University is considered one of today’s most respected urban sociologists and is known globally for her landmark research on transnationalism, denationalization and the impact of globalization on the movement of labour, capital, and urban life. A prolific author, Sassen’s recent books are Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages and A Sociology of Globalization. In Mumbai to present the Urban Age Award, she speaks to Sayandeb Chowdhury about Mumbai being a…

Indian political leader Mohandas Gandhi circa 1935. In 1938, 23-year-old Phillips Talbot was sent to India on a fellowship to learn about British-governed India. An American Witness To India’s Partition is a collection that springs out of his experiences in India and the subcontinent between 1938 and 1950, chronicling the build-up to the independence of India and Pakistan, and the early experiences of the new states. The book was released in India in an event organised by Asia Society in…

Buddha’s way. Photo by Leonard Laub on Unsplash The future of the Left in India will depend on the success of the ‘Bengal line’. There was a sigh of relief all round when the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) announced, after its central committee meeting in Kolkata, that it would give the UPA more opportunities to find a way out of the current imbroglio over the nuclear deal and not precipitate a political crisis. The general interpretation is…

Arjun Appadurai is the Senior Advisor for Global Initiatives and the John Dewey Professor in Social Sciences at New School University in New York. He was born and educated in Bombay and did his MA and PhD from the University of Chicago. Appadurai is one of the few scholars who have defined the way we have come to understand globalisation. He is also involved deeply with Mumbai-based NGO, PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge, Action and Research). He spoke to Sayandeb…

Different roads. Image Photo Arno Senoner/Unsplash Despite similar backgrounds, Mayawati (R) and Mamata seem to be going different ways. The extent of success that Mayawati’s ‘social engineering project’ is going to have in the daily business of running the largest state in India is currently one of the hottest debates in Indian politics. What is also dominating discussion is how she is going to influence government behaviour at the centre in the coming years. But what is already visible…