I used to think that the Democrats were the good guys and the Republicans were the bad guys. That’s why I’ve only ever been registered and identified as a Democrat. The Democratic Party is the party of social justice that looks out for the less fortunate, right? The party of the middle class, advocating for equality and progress, while the Republican Party, is … well … stuck in the distant past.
More than a hundred U.S. troops were sent to Lashkar Gah, Afghanistan on Monday to continue fighting the Taliban, in the first deployment of forces to the area since the drawdown in 2014—offering another signal that the U.S. military presence there is expanding, not decreasing, as President Barack Obama has promised.
Twenty-five years after the economic reforms were unleashed, the first-ever socio-economic survey for rural areas, published in 2015, paints a gloomy picture. Portraying a stark reality the survey says that for 70 per cent of India’s 125-crore population, which lives in rural areas, poverty is the way of life.
Rural India is poorer than what was estimated all these years. With the highest income of a earning member in 75 per cent of the rural households not exceeding Rs 5,000 a month, and with 51 per cent households surviving on manual labour as the primary source of income, the socio-economic survey had exposed the dark underbelly of rural India. Considering that the bulk of rural population comprise of farmers, what the socio-economic survey tells is how the reforms have very conveniently bypassed agriculture.Read More »
Globalization, a buzzword, has been variously interpreted and analysed. In its most widest and comprehensive manifestation globalization is understood primarily as an economic process that gradually absorbs the other domains of life like politics, culture, ethics, and morality. As an economic process it advocates the absorption of some policy measures which will revamp the economy of a national society[1] in tune with the terms of global trade and market relations. The policy measures are aimed at opening up of a national economy so that the free flow of capital, technology, goods and services, and labour across national boards could be ensured. Viewed as such globalization thus contributing towards lengthening of connections between places in ‘a novel way’ which were otherwise afar and making the world becoming more deeply interconnected through the churnings of – what has been called as – ‘living globally’. The turning of a rather economic process into cultural, social and political one depends upon several key factors and forces. These factors and forces – culminating in a new market mantra – are actualized through several agencies like Trans-national Corporations (TNCs), Information and Communication Technology (ICT), and the International Non-Governmental Organizations (INGOs).Read More »
History will remember Mahasweta Devi (14.01.1926-28.07.2016) as a conscience-keeper of her times. Awards and accolades could not moderate her views on the exploitative structure of the Indian society. She knew it well that a curtain separates India’s mainstream society from the marginalized and the deprived. As a matter of choice, she championed through her writings the demand for justice and honour for these disempowered people—comprising among others, women(identified as objects limited to the usefulness of their bodies), adivasis, Dalits, landless peasants, migrant labourers. She firmly stood by them. The stories and novels she wrote makes people aware of the process of ruthless internal colonisation of the land, communities and the cultures of those who do not wield power, by the mainstream predators. The characters in her stories and novels are all those whom she had observed closely. Read More »
Frontier | Vol. 49, No.6, Aug 14 – 20, 2016
Mahasweta-di (that was how I used to address her as an elder sister) was a dear friend of mine and my wife’s for a long time, although I drifted away from her during the last decade or so because of political reasons. I met her first, briefly sometime in the early 1960s, at the house of Shyamal Chakravarty (an old Communist friend of my family), in his ancestral home in Bhawanipur in south Calcutta. I still remember her, in those days, as a slim attractive woman in her 40s, and particularly the way she protruded her mouth and twisted her lips in a sarcastic way to dismiss the enemies in the anti-Left camp—an endearing trait that was to characterize her till the end. Read More »
Journal of People 