kriticulture

Fish swimming to the harmonies of divine kirtan in the Sarovar, Gurudwara Dukh Nivaran Sahib, Patiala

As a campaign like this should, the video speaks for itself.

On Literature Today By V. V. B. Rama Rao From Saraswata and Sahitya, Literature has come a long way today. The journey in itself takes us to the subject of Current Concerns and Forms of Expression. We have had a fabulous oral tradition, which subsumes literature, as we understand it, notwithstanding the OED defining it as written works valued for form and style. There have been literary works with different kinds of appeal, topical, historical, enduring and everlasting. All the time literature has been eminently related with human concerns, artistic, entertaining, ethical, enlightening and ennobling. Current concerns are important when we live in troubled times. The spirit of the times is permeated with thoughtlessness and an author's job it is to provoke, promote and motivate thinking with the fond hope of leading readers into new vistas, of light and understanding, of charity, tolerance and compassion. Even Adi Sankara thought it fit to sing his Kank...

Rajesh Kumar Sharma Ever since the process of economic reforms began in the 1990s, we have been hearing pious noises about the urgent need to reform education also. Obviously, the linkage is pragmatically motivated: economic growth cannot be sustained over a long period without a suitably reformed education system. This is good as far as it goes. If a concern for sustaining economic growth can trigger reforms in education, we should embrace the opportunity. But it would be disastrous to hang education from the peg of economics, as seems to be happening, without considering the other larger reasons for restructuring it. The need to see the larger picture is urgent also because the dominant vision of economics in the country today is itself very narrow. This is a vision shaped predominantly by corporate interests and not inspired by a socially responsible economic philosophy. A worthwhile exercise in educational reforms, on the contrary, must take into account the larger role that ed...

Charlotte Higgins in Guardian Link

Salman Rushdie: Now He’s Only Hunted by Cameras ‘There’s a writing self which is not quite your ordinary social self and which you don’t really have access to except at the moment when you’re writing, and certainly in my view, I think of that as my best self. To be able to be that person feels good; it feels better than anything else.’ Quote of the day Umberto Eco on other writers: ‘If they are different than me, I hate them, and if they are like me, I hate them.’ Quoted in a New York Times profile of Salman Rushdie. Link ------ Bits, Bands and Books By PAUL KRUGMAN It’s a good enough package that my guess is that digital readers will soon become common, perhaps even the usual way we read books. How will this affect the publishing business? Right now, publishers make as much from a Kindle download as they do from the sale of a physical book. But the experience of the music industry suggests that this won’t last: once digital downloads of books become standard, it will be hard for publi...

French Theory's American Adventures By FRANÇOIS CUSSET Link

1. Ngugi wa Thiong’o Kenya A disputed election, ethnic cleansing and widespread poverty – a lament for his homeland by one of Africa’s greatest writers. Read here . 2. Petina Gappah An Open Letter to Mbeki Dear Mr Mbeki, Something, call it instinct, tells me you won’t be poring over the Granta website any time soon, so I do not believe that you will read this letter. And if by an accident of the mouse-click, you find yourself directed to this page, I do not flatter myself that my insignificant scribbling will make a dent in your legendary mulishness. But I write to you, Mr Mbeki, because I have to. Read further .

“What we need is a critique of visual culture that is alert to the power of images for good and evil and that is capable of discriminating the variety and historical specificity of their uses.” - W.J.T. Mitchell. Picture Theory (1994). Link

ThoughtMesh is an unusual model for publishing and discovering scholarly papers online. It gives readers a tag-based navigation system that uses keywords to connect excerpts of essays published on different Web sites. Related Link