kriticulture

The Revenge of Karl Marx Link: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200904/hitchens-marx

Looking for a Different India Do you Really want a True Alternative to the traditional Politics ? to Corruption & Violence ? to Poverty & Unemployment ? to Illiteracy and Illnesses ? to Discrimination, Injustice and divisions ? to unfulfilled manifestos and broken promises ? to unequal growths ? to growing crimes ? If YES, Come ?The Time is Now ! We can do it and We Will Do It Together ! Welcome to the world of Changemakers. The world of Humanists volunteers. Let's work with similar minded people, selflessly, to build a Different India, a Humanist Nation, the India of our dreams. Visit www.humanistparty.org/index.php/change

Jeon Joge By Sukhwant Kaur Mann Translated by Paramjit Singh Ramana All the surroundings have gone desolate. I don’t know why peacocks don’t cry any more.... Day before yesterday, the feathers of the wild fowl lay scattered all over the road. It used to flutter around that big acacia tree and settled in the same tree every night.... How bright and sharp coloured its feathers were! .... In the morning the feathers lay scattered on the road. God knows which hunter found him or some dog or cat got hold of him.... It was the last wild fowl that had this acacia as his shelter. This village was destined to be demolished. But its residents were not willing to vacate it at all. The expanding city was almost touching it. Many notices had been issued ordering the villagers to clear out. But most of them had not been allotted any space to resettle. Some of them had been running dairies from their premises and some other had set up small businesses within the city. And a few aged people were too ...

Saahil Raina (Grade 1) (Saahil is the youngest contributor to this blog. I hope you enjoy his fine story. - RKS) Illustration: Google Clip Art Once there was a boy named Duck. He took a trip to the zoo with his dad. He got lost because he climbed up the tree to see the monkeys. The dad asks animals to help find where his son is. First, he asked the lion. The lion said, “He is in a tree but I can’t reach.” The dad asked the tiger and the tiger said, “I can’t reach either.” Then he asked the leopard. The leopard said, “None of the animals can reach except the camel.” Then the dad asked the camel and the camel said, “I can’t reach.” “The leopard said you could,” said the dad. The camel said, “The leopard is not smart. Go ask the giraffe.” The dad asked the giraffe, “Can you get my son out of the tree?” The giraffe said, “Yes.” The giraffe reached out his long neck and the boy climbed down. Then he went home with his dad.

A Short Story by Bushra Ejaz. Translated by Paramjit Singh Ramana . Once she decided to banish love out of her life, her world turned upside down. She had never thought that later she would face any such problem that she won’t be able to solve. And trying to solve that problem, she would herself become a problem. She had never thought that in loveless times the flowers fade, the breeze turns into scalding wind, sadness engulfs the walls of your home and despite the cacophony of noises emanating from the courtyard, a deafening silence overwhelms you and takes possession of your heart like a cobra with its hood raised, whose hissing sets your very being on such a fire that neither the cold water nor the icy winds can ever extinguish. The heart burns, the cobra hisses, the fire rages and doesn’t die out. Whatever you do, it does not die out; it just refuses to die out. She put her left hand on her chest and walked slowly towards the window. It was pitch dark in the street oppo...

Good man Muthalik, patriot— He downright honest man; He do not like this dirtiness, He clean up all he can. One problem he is having, though, That require CT Scan: The dirtiness he thinks he see Is all inside his brain. Muthalik, he like Amreeka For dollar and internet; But for keeping mahila disciplined Taliban are his pet. Kama Sutra, Khajurahu— Very spiritual are; Naked sadhu maharaj jies Spread that message far. Mahila, she is not to act, But to be acted upon; Bharat ki naari tu tou hai Very much mahan But only when you do observe Proper laaj and sharam; And oblige without argument When Muthalik is garam. Between these poles resides the crux Of your param dharma. Badri Raina badri.raina@gmail.com

by Naomi Klein (Courtesy The Nation , February 5, 2009) Watching the crowds in Iceland banging pots and pans until their government fell reminded me of a chant popular in anti-capitalist circles back in 2002: "You are Enron. We are Argentina." Its message was simple enough. You—politicians and CEOs huddled at some trade summit—are like the reckless scamming execs at Enron (of course, we didn't know the half of it). We—the rabble outside—are like the people of Argentina, who, in the midst of an economic crisis eerily similar to our own, took to the street banging pots and pans. They shouted, "¡Que se vayan todos!" ("All of them must go!") and forced out a procession of four presidents in less than three weeks. What made Argentina's 2001-02 uprising unique was that it wasn't directed at a particular political party or even at corruption in the abstract. The target was the dominant economic model—this was the first national revolt against contempo...

Book Reviews by M.L. Raina Identity, Culture and the Post-modern World By Madan Sarup.Edited by Tasneem Raja University of Georgia Press, Athens, USA pp.xvi+192. $15.95 Strangers to Ourselves By Julia Kristeva Translated from the French by Leon S.Roudiez Columbia University Press, New York pp.xii+230. $15.50 For starters let us consider the following three statements. The first from the addenda to Samuel Beckett’s Watt: “For all the good that frequent departures out of Ireland had done him, he might as well have stayed there”. The second by the first Duke of Wellington. Asked what his identity was, he curtly replied: “Sir, one is not an ass because one is born in a stable”. The third statement occurs in Naipaual’s Among the Believers to the effect that even though all Muslims are perceived as brothers in Islam (ummah), no Muslim country allows access to the citizens of another Muslim country without a valid visa. None of these statements is to be found in the above books, but each one...

North Point Press, New York Xvi+175 pages. $22. By M. L. Raina There is a scene in Kingsley Amis’s novel, ‘That Uncertain Feeling’, in which two characters are discussing a performance. They are intrigued by expressions like ‘in the Word was the beginning’. Finally they decide ‘dear! dear! the thing must be symbolical all right’. That was when symbolism was the badge of literary sophistication. I was reminded of this scene on reading Federick Crews’s sequel to his 1963 send-up of the period’s critical practice titled ‘The Pooh Perplex’. Just as the earlier book parodied the then prevalent critical trends, ‘Postmodern Pooh’ takes on the currently fashionable schools of critical theory that take postmodernism as their rallying slogan and go off at a tangent in its name. The wilful obfuscation of critical intelligence is the target of Crews’s parody, done in a gutsy, funny and hugely tonic fashion. If parody is a variety of exaggeration by confusing categories of actuality, Crews’s ...

By M. L. Raina Marxist Shakespeares Edited by Jean Howard& Scot Cutler Shershow Routledge, London & New York Pages xii+304. $27.95 “Others abide our question/Thou art free”—Matthew Arnold. Is he, really? Quite often, the bard has been wheeled around in the shopping trolleys of gossip and rumour-mongers, ideologues and sundry other interpreters, and, in our time, the peddlers of post-modern, post-structuralist, new historicist and feminist merchandise. He has been deglamourised and brought down from his pedestal by critics, stage directors and film makers. We are asked not to look up to him but to see beyond his myth. As a student I read my Shakespeare in ignorance of Ernest Jones’s Freudian speculations and Laurence Olivier’s guilt-ridden rendering of Hamlet on film. We knew nothing of Sergei Bondarchuk’s film of Hamlet as a critique of the feudal age, nor did have access to John Gielgud, Paul Robeson, Ralph Richardson or Dam...

Essay By HENRY ALFORD We may never fully understand what prompts people to leave unusual objects inside books. I speak of the slice of fried bacon that the novelist Reynolds Price once found nestled within the pages of a volume in the Duke University library. I speak of the letter that ran: “Do not write to me as Gail Edwards. They know me as Andrea Smith here,” which the playwright Mark O’Donnell found some years ago in a used paperback. I speak of any of those bizarre objects — scissors, a used Q-tip, a bullet, a baby’s tooth, drugs, pornography and 40 $1,000 bills — that have been discovered by the employees of secondhand bookstores, according to The Wall Street Journal and AbeBooks.com. Mystery surrounds these deposits like darkness. But the motives of some depositors — the novelist David Bowman, for instance — are knowable. “I was cleaning out a drawer and thought, Let’s do something with this,” Bowman said of the day four years ago when he stumbled upon all of the rejection lette...

The Nigerian writer talks about literature and faith I’m fascinated with the process of creating a character and the freedom of the creative process. I’m discovering as well, learning myself. Since I only realized I had the gift ten years ago, I felt I needed to develop this. I also like fiction because it is not doctrinaire. It is exploratory and you are invited to come and see, just like Jesus first invited would-be disciples to ‘come and see’. What you do after seeing is left to you. ... ... ... ... For example, when I read in newspapers that one million Rwandese were killed by their compatriots, it makes no sense to me. I have not seen a million people before. For me to even begin to understand, I may have to see how one person was killed and how much propaganda went into such an act. And if I hear someone sacrificed her life for another person, I try to work out in my mind how this was possible. Link

Fifteen Theses Rajesh Kumar Sharma 1 If democracy in India has not failed dramatically, this may not mean it has succeeded beyond question. Failures need not be absolute. The absence of one or more disasters in the short history of a democracy might screen from view some subtler and larger failure. Acknowledging the possibility of such a failure would require us to reconsider the very terms in which the public discourse of democracy is conducted. 2 If democracy is a particular “form of government”, the “form” may be still in good shape and yet all may not be well. 3 There is a danger in envisaging democracy as a state of affairs that comes to obtain for ever or long. The end of democracy does not necessarily mean, as Plato surmised, its replacement by some other form of government. Democracy may retain its form and yet have been undone. In the age of universal democracy, the real threat to democracies lurks within and in the realm of the universal. Hence the need to interrogate the po...

Of Which Real is this Crisis the Spectacle? Alain Badiou, Le Monde, 17/10/08. As it is presented to us, the planetary financial crisis resembles one of those bad films concocted by that factory for the production of pre-packaged blockbusters that today we call the "cinema". Nothing is missing, the spectacle of mounting disaster, the feeling of being suspended from enormous puppet-strings, the exoticism of the identical – the Bourse of Jakarta placed under the same spectacular rubric as New York, the diagonal from Moscow to Sao Paulo, everywhere the same fire ravaging the same banks – not to mention terrifying plotlines: it is impossible to avert Black Friday, everything is collapsing, everything will collapse... But hope abides. In the foreground, wild-eyed and focussed, like in a disaster movie, we see the small gang of the powerful – Sarkozy, Paulson, Merkel, Brown, Trichet and others – trying to extinguish the monetary flames, stuffing tens of billions into the c...