kriticulture

A Reading of Asad Zaidi’s Poem Asad Zaidi’s disturbingly powerful poem opens with a complex telescoping: 1857 has returned, with an immediacy that it did not have in 1857. There is guilt and a sense of wrong. Can we evade the burden of responsibility for all that has gone wrong? The speaking voice is ambivalent: are ‘we’ the people or the writers, or both? The soundscape, too, is ambivalent: there is the restive, loud India of people and there is the whispering India of agents and touts and political opportunists. Maybe this reality of contemporary India is the product of fiction and commercial cinema. Our unreal reality. But also an ironic shifting of the blame for sordid reality on to fiction and cinema. The aporia of representation. The metaphor of noise again changes – to become the tinkle-tinkle of money. The poem takes aim and fires at a Prime Minister’s magisterial faux pas. The telescoping returns: freedom has become only a name for the quest for a ...

By Amy Goodman, King Features Syndicate But nuclear power is not a solution to climate change -- rather, it causes problems. Amory Lovins is the co-founder and chief scientist of Rocky Mountain Institute in Colorado. He makes simple, powerful points against nuclear: "The nuclear revival that we often hear about is not actually happening. It is a very carefully fabricated illusion ... there are no buyers. Wall Street is not putting a penny of private capital into the industry, despite 100-plus percent subsidies." He adds: "Basically, we can have as many nuclear plants as Congress can force the taxpayers to pay for. But you won't get any in a market economy." Read the article here

By Rahnuma Ahmed `You should not have written about such sensitive issues in such indecorous language,’ faculty members at Jahangirnagar University (JU) told me and my ex-colleague, Manosh Chowdhury. It was 1997, four years before I left JU to become a writer. Read the complete article here

Mistaken identity Obsessing about culture traps people in their own history, argues Kenan Malik Today’s multiculturalists argue that to fight racism one must celebrate group identity. The consequence has been the resurrection of racial ideas and imprisonment of people within their cultural identities. Racial theorists and multiculturalists, the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut observes, have “conflicting credos but the same vision of the world”. Both fetishise difference. Both seek to “confine individuals to their group of origin”. Both undermine “any possibility of natural or cultural community among peoples”. Challenging such a politics of difference has become as important today as challenging racism. http://newhumanist.org.uk/1809

by Wilfred M. McClay Lamentations about the sad state of the humanities in modern America have a familiar, indeed almost ritualistic, quality about them. The humanities are among those unquestionably nice endeavors, like animal shelters and ­tree-­planting projects, about which nice people invariably say nice things. But there gets to be something vaguely annoying about all this cloying uplift. One longs for the moral clarity of a swift kick in the ­rear. Enter the eminent literary scholar Stanley Fish, author of a regular blog for The New York Times, who addressed the subject with a kicky piece entitled “Will the Humanities Save Us?” (Jan. 6, 2008). Where there is Fish there will always be bait, for nothing pleases this contrarian professor more than ­double-­crossing his readers’ expectations and enticing them into a heated debate, and he did not ­disappoint.... Link

Bright ideas in the Wild West By Jonathan Marcus Hundreds of people pay to attend - it is probably the most intellectual holiday camp in the world . . . . http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7488333.stm

By V.V.B. Rama Rao "Sleepwalking into segregation" is the phrase Dominic Casciani of BBC New home affairs used, while analyzing the question 'A Cohesive Britain?' The most important, and the not so well recognized, danger for our country is the dwindling cohesion of our society. Cohesion is the most important parameter for a society to exist. When this cohesion is challenged society stands in imminent danger of fractionalization, secession, segregation and finally disintegration. Society is a conglomerate of a people with a unique identity. Body Politic and Social Fabric are phrases, which suggest binding, and togetherness to make the group viable to stand on its own preserving its identity and homogeneity. Minor external differences, call them variations pleasantly, exist but they should not be accentuated for ill-conceived short-term gains. Reverence for authority besides near similarity of mindsets and perceptions, make for cohesion. Fellow feelin...