New Delhi

A very nice article about the Indian capital.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dissidence in Iran

An insightful and sometime exhaustive look at dissidence in Iran. Many parallels are drawn with the Czech dissident movement and India's own independence movement. The anti-Shah revolution was not hijacked by the clerics, he said, just as the Bolshevik revolution was not stolen by Stalin, as Trotsky had claimed. “We began revolution, in order to create a paradise, but we created hell.” An unjust regime can be changed only by civil disobedience, nonviolently, he holds. Invasion cannot export or impose democracy either. The basic thrust of the article is the claim that the fight in this world is not between civilizations, but between open secular societies and religious worlds. This fight happens, according to the author, in all societies including the western ones.
Read more

On Jinnah

An excellent article on Jinnah, debunking his secular credentials, in the wake of Advani's comments about Jinnah having wanted a secular Pakistan. Despite wiping out Hindus, Sikhs, Christians and Parsis, the Muslims of Pakistan have become more sectarian and intolerant about their Islamic faith than they were 50 or 100 years ago. Islam has assumed dangerously virulent forms today and Pakistan has come to be associated with terror and tyranny, rather than democracy and secularism. These developments are intrinsic to Jinnah’s ideology rather than unintended, unexpected by-products. Jinnah's legacy, says Madhu Kishwar, is a planted seed of hatred that consumes Pakistan and burns India in its wake. Another comment of note is about how the Sangh and Shiv Sena are but mirror images of Jinnah's politics. The Sangh Parivar hates Jinnah because Jinnah succeeded in his mission of dividing India by "uniting" Muslims into an ethnically cleansed state, whereas a whole century ...
Read more

Criticising Religion

This confirms one’s sense that whatever the truth about God, all religions without exception are fallible human creations, in parts beautiful and profound and in parts ridiculous and repellent. To protect them from criticism is bad for our society and, even more importantly, bad for our souls.
Read more