Skewering Intellectuals - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Skewering Intellectuals - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

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Remembering Maninder Singh Kang

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(18.5.1963-4.2.2013) By Rajesh Sharma I visualize him watching his own burning corpse and laughing a philosopher’s laughter. “Oye pandatā , this Kang was a dog’s tail of a man. Look, he is poking even the flames to laugh. What a struggle the wind and the fire are waging over his body. And look at the rain, it refuses to stop. His death seems to have released an excess of the five bhoots , making nature go berserk.”                 Listening to him, I try to make sense of his bizarre inner geography.                 “He’ll be impossible to replace. It’s such a loss,” he adds in an altogether different mood.       Maninder had this ability to move effortlessly between gaiety and gravity. He probably had found the thread that connects the extremes.        ...
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Punjab Finance Minister Wants a Punjabi Ku Klux Klan

March 1, 2010. Punjabi University, Patiala. The second day of the Conference on Transnational Punjabi Literature and Culture: Challenges and Opportunities organised by the well-meaning World Punjabi Centre and Sahitya Akademi. The young Finance Minister of Punjab, Manpreet Singh Badal walks in without the spectacular paraphernalia of gun-wielding security men. The calls made by all and sundry for nurturing Punjabi language move him deeply. And therefore, as he rises to speak, he is at his oratorical best. And most irrational. He unspools anecdote after anecdote to lace his very sincere speech. The climax comes with a call to the Punjabis to take a leaf from Ku Klux Klan, the American far right hate group which, in the Hon'ble Minister's judgement, showed enviable commitment to the threatened white supremacy. The Punjabis could form a society like the KKK, he innocently opines, to secure the supremacy of Punjabi. But he could just be using a metaphor, you may say. I agree. I ag...
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Remembering my teacher

By Rajesh Kumar Sharma A friend, who also is a teacher, recently sent an sms: satinder singh passed away this morning . Satinder Singh introduced me to the art of reading literature. He taught us to read patiently, to wait like birds even as reading hatched taking its own time. And he taught us to navigate literary works like wayfarers exploring the labyrinthine patterns of some Persian carpets. I remember the day -it must have been in 1980- I first went up to Satinder Singh. As always, he was there outside the classroom well before the class began. I had been reading a poem by Tennyson and had some questions. He heard me out and asked me to see him again the following day. 'Read this book over the weekend and come back to me,' he said, handing me The Complete Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson . I looked apprehensively at the forbidding tome but he reassured me, 'You'll read it through, I know.' And he smiled, patted my shoulder and walked into the class. ...
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