2010

Though in the wake of 9/11 and attack on Iraq there is a shift from deconstruction towards politics, deconstruction is of great assistance to post-human cultural studies when it comes to analysing its relationship with politics. Cultural studies have tended to place human rights in a transcendental position with respect to all other discourses. Human rights cannot flourish without interaction of the civil society with the constitutive outside in a particular order.
It is through rhetoric (…)

by Sonali Narang
It is now a well accepted fact that climate change has become the most dangerous problem before humanity. In this paper, I have tried to explain how the process of migration, which is stimulated by climate change, is leading to displacement of people particularly in South Asia.
Climate Change and Displacement
MILLIONS of people around the globe are at the risk of displacement due to climate change turning them out of their homes, whether temporarily or permanently. It (…)

No matter how tired we are in the course of a difficult day’s work, there is always the reassuring feeling that at the end of the hard work we’ll go back to sleep in the comfort of our home. But there are millions of people in our cities who simply do not have a home. The homeless of our cities suffer the most; yet they are the most neglected. No matter how adverse the weather conditions, they’ve to generally spend their nights on the footpath, near the railway station or bus stop or (…)

TRIBUTE
These are days when the success of an author depends less on the worth of his writings and more on the vigour with which he promotes himself through book launches, television conversations and lectures organised by the marketing department of publishing companies. P. Lal did none of these. So his death (November 3) went almost unnoticed. A newspaper para-graph or two in his home town of Kolkata and that was that.
Yet P. Lal’s place in the literary history of India will be more (…)

by M.S. Jaglan
There is a growing concern among the liberal minded individuals, social and democratic organisations and even international institutions on the rising trend of brutal killings of innocent youngsters in the name of family or clan honour in India. The United Nations also takes a very serious view of such heinous crimes. The naked brutality of such acts against women is in contravention of the spirit of the ’United Nations Convention on the Elimination of all forms of (…)

by M.S. Rana
Honour is the most precious moral attribute of mankind. It is deeply ingrained in its nature. Defence of honour even at the cost of life has been prevalent in human beings since ages. It is a commonwealth of close blood relatives. Defilement of honour is taken as the most atrocious social crime and its redemption becomes a joint and sacred duty of close-knit people. Debased groups have a soft approach towards transgression of honour. The sentimental chord dormant in them may (…)

COMMUNICATION
We are all aware how destructive modern war, particularly nuclear war, can become, but still very few people may be aware that for a considerable period of recent history as many as 170 to 290 million (17 to 29 crore) killings were to be carried out in a single overwhelming nuclear attack. This doesn’t include deaths from the longer-term impact of nuclear weapons.
This happened around the year 1960 when the US military prepared its first formal nuclear war plan called the (…)

The Jharkhand Government has launched a new operation in the State; it can be called “Operation NGO Hunt”. In a latest discovery, the Jharkhand Police have found 1300 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) as sympa-thisers of the Naxalites though nobody knows the ‘parameters’ of the ‘sympathisers’. However, the way the state is behaving with these organisations, it is very clear that anyone who raises questions against the violation of the rights of the people residing in the Red Corridor is (…)

BOOK REVIEW
Zombie Capitalism: Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx; by Chris Harman; Bookmarks Publications; 2009.
Marx compared capital to a vampire, that ‘only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks’. For Chris Harman, as pictured on the cover of the book, it is better compared to the mindless, destructive zombie, ’seemingly dead when it comes to achieving human goals and responding to human feelings, but capable of sudden spurts of activity (…)

[Many Streams: Selected Essays by Jagannath Sarkar and Reminiscing Sketches was brought out last April in Patna to honour the veteran Communist leader of Bihar, Jagannath Sarkar. The author, who knew Jagannath Sarkar quite well, went through the publication and sent the following article for Mainstream. —Editor[
This is not a review of the charming collection of essays by Jagannath Sarkar and his admirers but a tribute to Jagannathda, a gentle colossus, made brief by a severe constraint of (…)