kriticulture

Mara Hvistendahl’s research leads her into the dark chambers of population control history in Asia The following excerpt, reproduced from Foreign Policy , reveals just the tip of the criminal icebrg:  In India, meanwhile, advisors from the World Bank and other organizations pressured the government into adopting a paradigm, as public-health activist Sabu George put it to me, "where the entire problem was population." The Rockefeller Foundation granted $1.5 million to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), the country's top medical school, and the Ford Foundation chipped in $63,563 for "research into reproductive biology." And sometime in the mid-1960s, Population Council medical director Sheldon Segal showed the institute's doctors how to test human cells for the sex chromatins that indicated a person was female -- a method that was the precursor to fetal sex determination. Soon after, the technology matured, and second-trimester fetal sex d...

By Joga Singh                    The assertions made in "AT THE CROSSROADS OF LANGUAGE" by Geetanjali Bhagat and others (The Tribune, Chandigarh, Monday April 25, 2011, p. 9) are good evidence that many people even working in the field of English teaching are living in a mythical linguistic world. Since the issue is of paramount importance to society at large, these myths need to be revealed. The honorable commentators make following assertions: i) that English "has become one of the most important skills for advancement"; ii) that "A major reason for the rural students not being able to speak well in the English language is their late exposure to the language...." and; iii) that "we should have a uniform system in which all children, rural and urban, must have access to education in English medium...." Firstly, if English was to be so essential a skill for advancement, India, then, would have b...

By Birinder Pal Singh The Foreign Secretary talked of the ‘Mohali Spirit’ which is supposed to usher India and Pakistan into a new era of friendship and peace. It was for this reason that the chief executives of the two governments were accosted by the ruling party high command of the host nation. It is a political gimmick on the part of both governments. I wonder how a match generating so much heat and pressure could lead us to think of peace, leave aside realising it on ground. The symbolism all around is suggestive of negative consequences.             Was there any one from the Indian side who supported the Pakistani flag or symbol on her face or body like it was done for our team. How could one do that? If someone dared, s/he would be branded a traitor and an anti-national. No Indian could shout in favour of the Pakistani team for the same reason. Reading into the highly charged emotions, I remarked to my young nephew, a cric...

By Badri Raina First things first, O departed emperor of zest and   bare-footed laughter: it was not the brainless bigots who exiled you, but we who claim patent on sanity. Unlike your so resplendent going, we have been dead several times over from fear, trembling, and sensible doing. Thus, knowing better, it was foolish of you to be disappointed with us. But now that we are safe from you, ‘civil society’ will surely shout for a monument   where our wares we may profitably pursue. O Alexander of the art world, like him you passed in exile with work in hand; like him, in genius and in folly, you were always grand. He soaked Grecian nectars at Aristotle’s feet; you became the best of Hindus from lifelong love of the street. Those that made Socrates choose hemlock were not Greek; those that lost you home were not Hindus. Thus, on your flying horse the Greeks called Pegasus you soar,   but with eye still on the wicked world, that, with brush still in hand, you wish to ...

By Beena Sarwar 09 June, 2011 from Countercurrents.org Link   T he murder of professor Saba Dashtiyari in Quetta last week, coming on the heels the killing of investigative journalist Saleem Shehzad, is yet another sign of an ongoing `genocide' of progressive Pakistani intellectuals and activists. `Genocide' generally means the deliberate destruction of an ethnic group or tribe. In this context, it applies to the tribe of Pakistanis who have publicly proclaimed or implicitly practiced the enlightenment agenda of freedom of conscience. They may have very different, even opposing, political views but they are people who are engaged knowingly or unknowingly with spreading `enlightenment' values. Out to undermine or eliminate members of this tribe is the `establishment' – defined here as the sections of state long engaged in establishing Pakistan's "Islamic" identity and determining the "national interest". They decide who is a patri...

By Nonica Datta New Delhi: Oxford, 2009 Pages xv+235; Price Rs 695 BOOK REVIEW By Rajesh Kumar Sharma (From the forthcoming issue of South Asian Ensemble ) With enviable patience and sophistication, Nonica Datta teases out history’s secrets by ‘developing’ – like a photo-artist – its narratives. These narratives are the deposits, in the manner of a great riverbed, of event, memory and invention. Datta is an extraordinary historian because she is more than a mere historian: she is also an archaeologist of Walter Benjamin’s description, she reads ‘stories’ like Marx reading Balzac, she is not afraid to fictionalize if it helps to historicize, and she suggests but does not judge. You rarely come across a book which you relish so thoroughly – even in its preface, glossary, map, endnotes and ‘supplement’ (for that is what chapter 3, A Letter to Subhashini, may best be called, recalling Derrida).             Violence, Martyrdom and P...

The Intellectual’s Vocation in the Postcolony  Rajesh Kumar Sharma (Originally published in Countercurrents )   Link to the article in Spanish: Arundhati Roy sein oder nicht sein Link to the article in German: Ser o no ser Arundhati Roy Link to the article in French: Etre ou ne pas être Arundhati Roy Following the mainstream media’s ‘reproductions’ of her remarks in a seminar on Kashmir in October 2010 [1] , Arundhati Roy appeared to have been promptly disowned by a majority of the surfing-texting Indian middle class. She had transgressed, it seemed, the farthest limits of discursive protocol of the permissive Indian democracy.                 She had not actually said anything not stated before. It had been her declared position on Kashmir for almost a decade. “I said what I as well as other commentators have written and said for years,” she promptly reminded those baying for h...

By Nicholas Dames (A comprehensive take on the crisis in the humanities - rks) Richard Rorty once argued that Western culture needs the novel, in order to force us to imagine lives and destinies different from our own. Perhaps the humanities, in their current plight, need to be novelistic again. Not necessarily in their fictional mode, such as the moribund campus novel genre with its essentially demystifying comedy, but the novelistic ability to marshal narratives and details that give us back some sense of why the humanities exist for individuals — how, to put it bluntly, they still rescue lives. One doesn’t enter the academy to become a disillusioned professional (although that will happen along the way). One doesn’t enter it to equip businesses with flexible analytic intellects (although that will also happen). One enters it, shamefacedly and unhappily, perhaps, but enters it nonetheless, in order to devote oneself to something greater than personal resentments — to...

Shadow over democracy By Rajesh Kumar Sharma In his written statement submitted to the court in the trial of 1922, Gandhi famously stated the following: They do not know [that] a subtle but effective system of terrorism and an organized display of force on the one hand, and the deprivation of all powers of retaliation or self-defense on the other, have emasculated the people . . . . He was referring to the characteristic British method of subjugating the Indians: terrorise them through use of force and, at the same time, weaken them so much that they will not be able to even stand on their feet. Gandhi chose to use a word that might have for some today sexist connotations but that implied the extraction of the nerve that makes a man a man, a human being a human being - the nerve that flashes in the eyes of a woman too when she refuses to be treated like refuse, the nerve of resistance against insults to our sense of self-respect and dignity. In the Gita , Krishna touches the sa...

Shadow over democracy By Rajesh Kumar Sharma As I adjust the keyboard this Sunday morning to write on some recent legislation in Punjab, the flutter of newspapers crashing like blinded bats into the porch prompts me to go out and collect their scattered pages. Glancing over the headlines, the eyes pause over Punjabi Tribune .  ‘Treasury pays Rs 3.14 crores for the treatment of CM’s Wife’ – the headline is blabbering morosely.  Not a week ago the paper had carried the news that the state government had exempted King’s XI from payment of Rs 2 crores worth of taxes. On another page the same day it reported the enactment of the Punjab Civil Services (Rationalisation of Certain Conditions of Services) Act 2011. I visited the state government’s website to see if I could read the text of the Act. I was disappointed. When the Punjab Special Security Group Act 2010 and the Punjab (Prevention of Damage to Public and Private Property) Act 2010 were enacted some months back, I had to ...