kriticulture

Basil Davidson, path-breaking historian of Africa, dies at 95 » peoplesworld

from ShahidulNews They meander and glide. They unfurl with the rage of monsoon fury. Quietly they flow in the misty winter morn. Rivers thread the fabric of our land. Embroider patches of fertile delta. They are the nakshi kantha of our rural folklore. Life giver, destroyer, enchanter, they have inspired the greatest myths, formed the tapestry for the most endearing love songs. Our Bhatiali has been shaped by the lilt of the boatman’s lyrics drifting across the waves. Kabir Hossain homeward bound

By ISABEL KERSHNER From The New York Times JERUSALEM — Amid the horrors of the Holocaust, the atrocities perpetrated by a few brutal women have always stood out, like aberrations of nature. There were notorious camp guards like Ilse Koch and Irma Grese. And lesser known killers like Erna Petri, the wife of an SS officer and a mother who was convicted of shooting to death six Jewish children in Nazi-occupied Poland; or Johanna Altvater Zelle, a German secretary accused of child murder in the Volodymyr-Volynskyy ghetto in Nazi-occupied Ukraine. The Nazi killing machine was undoubtedly a male-dominated affair. But according to new research, the participation of German women in the genocide, as perpetrators, accomplices or passive witnesses, was far greater than previously thought. The researcher, Wendy Lower, an American historian now living in Munich, has drawn attention to the number of seemingly ordinary German women who willingly went out to the Nazi-occupied eastern territories as pa...

Badri Raina (From Badri Raina's Znet Page) O Brave New India that hath such Creatures in it. I Clap clap, and clap again. India’s GDP is set to grow at 9.4%, sayeth the oracle of the World Bank. So, where is the high table, and why aren’t we on it yet? And what is a mere G-20; it is the permanent membership of the Round Table we seek and deserve. Our knights now shine too resplendentally, O Arthur-Sam. So, move over, you defunct old inheritors of defunct old glory. Our charge now resistless indeed. Which is perhaps why the evil ones conspire to stymie that charge with ill-intended facts and figures. Familiar colonial perfidy alive and well still, epicentred where else but in that decrepit Oxford. They now unleash another GDP to undermine our Icarian flight, namely, Gross Destitute People. Some busybody Director of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative brings out a Report on world poverty based on Multi-Dimensional I...

By Gurbhagat Singh and Deepinder Jeet Randhawa Published by Singh Brothers, Amritsar, 2009 Pages 144 Price Rs. 225 Review Essay By Rajesh Kumar Sharma When Gurbhagat Singh told me a few months ago that he and Deepinder Jeet Randhawa had just brought out a book on “Sikh memory”, I could not but again admire his untiring commitment to a life of the intellect. He has been producing, year after year, serious scholarly work. I told him I would soon read the book. Read it I did, though not very soon. I went through the Introduction the day I got hold of the book. But then it lay there, on my bedside, for untold nights, unfinished and shut like some intrusive old gossip’s mouth, making faces at me. I would have loved to read it to its last page with keenness, awe and thirst (such expectations I had of its principal contributor!), but the Introduction had left me distressed and too dehydrated for further adventure anytime soon. There were minor irritants (but then is it not a mino...