Berfrois

Seach Results for "Gandhi" (38)

{raven, writing desk}

{raven, writing desk}

The Mad Hatter, Sir John Tenniel, 1865 by William Flesch One modern incarnation of the debate between nominalism and realism is to be found in philosophical arguments about sets. There are two ways of characterizing a set: intensionally, through description (e.g. the set of all inhabitants of London, to use an example of Russell’s), and extensionally,…

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‘Antiquity-continuity; diversity-unity; massivity-democracy; multiconfessionality-secularity’

‘Antiquity-continuity; diversity-unity; massivity-democracy; multiconfessionality-secularity’

Delhi, August 1947 From London Review of Books: ‘Astonishing thought: that any culture or civilisation should have this continuity for five or six thousand years or more; and not in a static or unchanging sense, for India was changing and progressing all the time,’ marvelled the country’s future ruler a few years before coming to…

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Changing the Discourse on the Landless

Changing the Discourse on the Landless

by Irakli Zurab Kakabadze There has been a big discussion about what is more effective during class struggle, Gandhian nonviolent strategy or going back to Leninist or Stalinist methods of violent uprising. The Indian movement of landless people Ekta Parishad has been around for the last 12 years. Rajagopal PV and Jill Carr-Harris have been…

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More and More Bankrupt

More and More Bankrupt

by Irakli Zurab Kakabadze Once again, we can see that almost the entire world is trembling with the expectation of change. It looks like the world is refusing to suffocate itself with the single philosophy and single ideology that is already there for the last 20 years. Events are taking a different turn – even…

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By turns Tolstoy played the aristocrat and the peasant, the literary genius and the holy fool…

By turns Tolstoy played the aristocrat and the peasant, the literary genius and the holy fool…

Barefoot Tolstoy, Ilya Repin, 1901 From Barnes and Noble Review: Tolstoy spent years on a four-volume, 700-page ABC and reading primer, a work he regarded more highly than War and Peace. (Upon its publication in 1872 it received neither good reviews nor official approval, but with its republication thirteen years later it became a bestseller,…

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Nico Slate: Satyagraha on the Spot

Nico Slate: Satyagraha on the Spot

by Nico Slate On Thursday November 17, a few days after Occupy Wall Street protesters were evicted from Zuccotti Park, a poster emerged declaring “mass non-violent direct action” to “shut down wall street,” “occupy the subways,” and “take the square.” While the reference to “non-violent direct action” reminded me of Martin Luther King and Mahatma…

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Markha Valenta on the Utøya island shooting

Markha Valenta on the Utøya island shooting

AUF Summer Camp on Utøya, 2010, photograph by Arbeidernes Ungdomsfylking (AUF)  by Markha Valenta However nuanced, it is striking how little extant interpretations attend to the fact that Breivik’s most grotesque violence was not directed at Muslims or immigrants as such but at the youth members of the Norwegian Social Democrats. Anders Breivik may be…

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“Sir, don’t call off the fast”

“Sir, don’t call off the fast”

Arvind Kejriwal, photograph by Joe Athialy From Caravan: Shortly after Anna Hazare broke his fast-unto-death on 9 April, a group of young people encircled a small man with a black moustache at Jantar Mantar and began shouting the famous pre-independence slogan: Inquilab Zindabad! (Long Live Revolution!). He continued walking toward a group of cars when…

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Women of the MCP

A young Li Qiu: an integral female member of the party, Li Qiu represented the MCP in China. She now lives in Beijing. Photograph courtesy of CC Chin. by Adrianna Tan Not surprisingly, a history – official, academic and popular – of the Malayan communists, with the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) at the core of…

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Detroit Red

Real Politiks From The Chronicle Review: Malcolm X bestrides the postwar age of decolonization alongside global icons like Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. If King and Gandhi evoked nonviolence and disciplined civil disobedience as a shield to protect the world from imperial wars, racism, and rampant materialism, Malcolm wielded the specter of self-defense,…

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‘In idleness is the salvaging of the inner life’

‘In idleness is the salvaging of the inner life’

An Idle Moment, John White Alexander, c. 1885 From Lapham’s Quarterly: Idleness—that beautiful, historically encumbered word. Beautiful because childhood is its first sanctuary and still somehow inheres in its three easy syllables—and who among us doesn’t sway toward the thought of it, often, conjuring what life might be like if it were still a play…

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‘To Algeria, with Love’ by Suzanne Ruta

‘To Algeria, with Love’ by Suzanne Ruta

John Perivolaris    To Algeria, with Love sketches the portrait of an Algerian everyman through the eyes of his ditsy American girlfriend (who hears his hopes and dreams) and his grieving daughter (who knows his bitter disappointments). The novel is set in France 1961, in Algeria, 1988 and in New York, 2003. From Part I,…

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Is there an Indian way of thinking about politics?

Is there an Indian way of thinking about politics?

Rashtrapati Bhawan From The Caravan: Is there an Indian way of thinking? The poet and scholar AK Ramanujan considered the question at length in a celebrated essay on the subject. The answer, he decided, would depend on which word of the question one chose to stress. The same is true of the following variation on…

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“I have never been able to think that I am anything but just a non-bluffing person”

Nele Brönner From The Hindu: Could you tell us a little bit about your intellectual evolution. You are considered among one of the foremost thinkers in the world today. Did you have any sense of how far you would go? Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: No, frankly, no (laughs). I have never been able to think that…

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Imperial Citizens

Imperial Citizens

The last (1944) batch of the Indian Civil Service in Dehra Dun, Ghulam Nabi Kazi by Claude Markovits Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire, by Sukanya Banerjee, Durham: Duke University Press, 272 pp. Nationalist teleologies often result in the erasure of significant moments and movements, because the latter do not fit within the grand…

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“I wasn’t going to have a jacket with tigers and ladies in saris”

From The Guardian: So, as a political person, how would she describe her politics? She has spent weeks with the Maoist insurgents in central India – a dangerous adventure in a bloody war that has killed thousands of people and emptied hundreds of villages – but she isn’t a Maoist: “I’m not unaware of what…

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‘India: A Portrait’ by Patrick French

‘India: A Portrait’ by Patrick French

Rahul Gandhi From Outlook India: It had first become apparent to me during the 2004 election campaign, and it niggled again now. The problem was the first-time MPs. With their spanking faces and sense of bland entitlement, these young men and women were treated with reverence by the Indian media, although their achievement was usually…

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‘The tightrope walk and intense international scrutiny will create piquant situations for India’

Indira Gandhi visits Pokrahn, 1974 From Outlook India: Even at the worst of times, we Indians have had an exalted  notion of ourselves and our nation. Perhaps our hubris is rooted in our being an ancient civilisation, of having discovered the nuances of urban planning two millennia before the Romans, of having produced sophisticated philosophical…

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