kriticulture

Monday 19 December 2011 by Henry A. Giroux, Truthout | Op-Ed Source: Here In both the United States and  many other countries, students are protesting against rising tuition fees, the increasing financial burdens they are forced to assume, and the primacy of market models in shaping higher education while emphasizing private benefits to individuals and the economy. Many students view these policies and for-profit industries as part of an assault on not just the public character of the university but also as an attack on civic society and their future.  For many young people in the Occupy movement, higher education has defaulted on its promise to provide them with both a quality education and the prospects of a dignified future. They resent the growing instrumentalization and accompanying hostility to critical and oppositional ideas within the university. They have watched over the years as the university is losing ground as a place to think, dissent, and develop a cult...

By Rajesh Kumar Sharma   (Published in Daily Post 20 December 2011) The only political rally I went to as a child has not faded from my memory. Those were the days after the Emergency. Atal Bihari Vajpayee was coming to address the people in Kanak Mandi, the market square of Hoshiarpur. The whole town seemed to have poured out to hear him. I trailed my father to have a glimpse of the country's best known orator. I vaguely recall the big crowd, its sheer enthusiasm and the great distance between me and the stage. And I have not forgotten a studiedly casual remark Vajpayee made before an all-male audience, which elicited all round applause and laughter. "Look at poor me, Indiraji will say, a woman, hounded by all those men!" Time may have altered the syntax, but the content of the remark remains imprinted in my memory like an unforgettable photograph. I did not then know that it was a sexist remark. Nor did I know it had been made in bad taste.     ...

He served 14 years as president, wrote 19 plays, inspired a film and a rap song and remained one of his generation’s most seductively nonconformist writers. He rejected the notion, posited by reform-minded Communist leaders like Alexander Dubcek in his own country, and years later by Mikhail S. Gorbachev in the Soviet Union, that Communist rule could be made more humane. In his now iconic 1978 essay “ The Power of the Powerless ,” which circulated in underground editions in Czechoslovakia and was smuggled to other Warsaw Pact countries and to the West, Mr. Havel foresaw that the opposition could eventually prevail against the totalitarian state. Source: Czechs’ Dissident Conscience, Turned President - NYTimes.com

By Badri Raina Source: Znet   Duniya banAnei vAlei, kya  tere mann mei samAyei, kAhei ko duniya banAyei? (whatever got into your head, o creator/ why did you create the world?) Lines from a film song that  have  comprised  absolutely my mother’s most favourite  poser.  And mine as well. She has now entered her one hundredth year—you heard that right—and  is  tough-minded  enough to say she still does not have an answer, although her ninety nine have been full of observance and piety. So, does she not fear death and the alleged aftermath?  I suspect she takes cognizance of those things, but refuses to attach herself to an order of  constructions that she remains unconvinced about.  Mama, I salute the integrity of your mind and  heart. Being of a high intellectual calibre, and honest to the core, she is unable to say that watching cinema in a theatre or drinking a shot of whisky now and t...