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Showing posts from January, 2010

A Tale of Two Chief Ministers

By Badri Raina From Badri Raina's ZSpace Page, January 24, 2010 Link I Long years ago, at the conclusion of my doctoral work in America, pressure was put on me to stay and teach there. Twice, in fact. Each time I made excuses. Pressed hard to explain I had the following to say: --admittedly, staying on there would yield me every facility to write half a dozen books, but once outside the confines of academe, what would I be a part of? By ‘what' I meant what sort of active political involvement. It did seem to me that the "end of history" thesis justly applied to the United States. With few resistance movements on the ground, post-Vietnam, only centrist politics remained available. And who doesn't know that the Republicans and the Democrats are, all said and done, tweedledum and tweedledee, espousing at bottom one and the same class interest. There has rarely been an occasion when American history in the contemporary moment seemed to offer any major openin

Why do extremes unsettle our comfortable middle ground?

By Badri Raina (Excerpts from Badri Raina's Znet Article) Reading what our well-intentioned prime minister said in his address the other day to Speakers of sundry parliaments from the Commonwealth countries, the Bard sprang to my mind, as he so often does in so many contemporary contexts. To wit, the otherwise piety-ridden Manmohan Singh expressed deep apprehension at the vile attempts of some "extremists" to cause unacceptable imbalances and dethronements in the orderly project of the peaceful enhancement of mainline developmental concerns, piloted no doubt by men in power who know best. So it struck me, not for the first time, how little a part of that enhancement seemed, despite politic pronouncements from time to time, meant to touch the lives of the "poor naked wretches" of whom India still comprises some two thirds of its population. It struck me that none of those politic pronouncements ever carry the agonized charge of Lear's "O, I have taken t

A Yuppie entrepreneur chides his old teacher

By M. L. Raina All my rage is just an encrustation, On the basic fact of my frustration. So lectures my muse without even a comma, That I am suffering from an infantile trauma. I fancied a car, a house and a kitty, But never could acquire them, O what a pity. That is why I rave, and scowl and sulk, To see my neighbour’s prosperous hulk. For his well-earned riches and his wife I pine, He thinks I’m a scavenging upstart, swine. Instead of wallowing in jealousy’s shit, Can’t I do what he did to make myself fit? Into his circle of the ‘honest’ and the ‘pure’, By simply taking to Darwin’s cure. Damn my Freud, my cussed dirty Marx, The likes of me are nothing but petty, petty sharks. He wants me to rise above pettiness and hate And see for myself how little I create To keep me alive, a whiny old crone, An ungrateful grumbler, a parasitic drone. An aggrandizing critic, a probing prying rat, An intellectual worm with vision of a bat. Discontented natterer, disaffected bore, A tubercular loud-m

Culture, Now

Rajesh Kumar Sharma (The following is a reconstruction, and translation from Punjabi, of the lecture given on 20 November 2009 at a seminar organized by Pragativaadi Sabhyacharak Manch, Chandigarh) When I received the programme chart for this seminar a few days ago , I discovered that its theme would be India's current policy on culture. I wondered if I was qualified in any way to speak on such a matter. The wonder has by no means lessened, but it has prompted me to formulate a few basic questions. The first question, expectedly, is whether India currently has any policy on culture. Assuming that it has, and assuming also that by India's policy is meant the government's policy, one may ask whether it fairly and adequately represents the wishes and needs of the Indian people at this moment of history. One may go further and even ask whether culture should at all be subject to policy-making. On the other hand, the brute fact is that whether or not there is a formulated polic