Alive at India's Dead Ends - Gopalkrishna Gandhi delivers the Second AK Ramanujan Lecture; New Conference Hall, Ramjas College on March 6, 2014

By Dilip -
The History Society, Ramjas College

Open invitation to a National Seminar: Speaking of the Hindus
and the 
Second A.K. Ramanujan Lecture
New Conference Hall (above the canteen), Ramjas College
March 6, 2014, 10.30 am onwards

Profs. DN Jha, Kunal Chakrabarti and Apoorvanand will speak at the Seminar which will be chaired by Prof. Romila Thapar, 10.30 am -1 pm.

Shri Gopalkrishna Gandhi will deliver the Second AK Ramanujan Lecture , between 2 and 3.15 pm. 
The title chosen by Gopal Gandhi for his talk is Alive at India's Dead Ends

At 5.30 pm Vidya Shah will perform 'Akhtari', a musical tribute to Begum Akhtar, with Danish Husain.


Please circulate widely & come in large numbers for more reasons than one. After all, as a film lover once remarked, 'I don't go to film festivals just to see films'! 

Mukul Mangalik, Seminar-in-charge, History Society Ramjas College
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Prof Irfan Habib's remark on AMU minority character causes stir
Javed Anand - Ms Wadud, we are ashamed
Academic research on Rushdie's literary work sabotaged by Deoband Ulema

VHP disrupts Hyderabad's Kashmir Film Festival

Gita Sahgal - Bangladesh: Blasphemy, Genocide and Violence Against Women

Taslima Nasreen - ‘Religion Is The Biggest Bane For Any Democracy’

Syed Badrul Ahsan calls for Taslima's return - Our writers, our moral parameters

Two persons arrested for Facebook post on Mumbai shutdown after Bal Thackeray's death

Venue for a Speech on Tamas - A Chronicle of an Event That Should Never Have Happened
Call on the Catholic Archdiocese of Bombay to encourage the withdrawal of complaints against Indian Rationalist Sanal Edamaruku
LUMS fires Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy
Maryam Namazie: Defend Bangladesh's Bloggers
Inquisition: The Reign of Fear
Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain

Report of the first NDA government's (1998) brazen attempt to 'revise' Gandhi's Collected Works. Hundreds of whimsical deletions and changes were noticed by well-known scholars and Gandhians in India and around the world, who viewed them as an insult to scholarship, and demanded an end to such attempts to play with historical documents. Read the history of the controversy. Tridip Suhrud, now director of Sabarmati Ashram, wrote a detailed analysis of this shameless behaviour in EPW in November 2004. It was only after the defeat of the NDA government that the fraudulently 'revised' edition of the CWMG was withdrawn, in 2005
Salim Mansur - Islam and Islamism
Tableeghi Jamaat members can knock at any door anywhere in the West. But Christian missionaries cannot proselytize the Muslim world
‘Freedom to criticize religion is a touchstone of free expression’ - Gilbert Achcar
 WOLE SOYINKA: Religion Against Humanity
IHEU Freedom of Thought Report 2013: Death penalty for atheism in 13 countries
Salman Rushdie - ON CENSORSHIP
Salman Rushdie - We're all too easily offended these days
New Age Islam Website Is Banned In Pakistan
Taksim, Convergence, and Secular Space // Turkey, the end of Islamism with a human face
Khaled Ahmed - A culture of haters

Khaled Ahmed - Rollback nations (NEWSWEEK PAKISTAN)
Interview with Karima Bennoune, author of 'Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here'
Woman filmmaker in Iran sentenced to 18 months in prison 
The religious persecution of Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd (1945-2010)/ Interview: My life fighting intolerance/ Mahmoud Mohammed Taha & the Second Message of Islam
Mahmoud Mohammed Taha (Author of Second Message of Islam); also known as Ustaz Mahmoud Mohammed Taha, was a Sudanese religious thinker, leader, and trained engineer. He was executed for apostasy at the age of 76 by the regime of Gaafar Nimeiry. (See his Court statement)
THE MODERATE MARTYR - A radically peaceful vision of Islam
Najam Sethi - Pakistan: Pluralism and tolerance
Unfortunately, attempts to rationalize and modernize our education system have continuously foundered on the rock of misplaced, conservative or politically motivated religious elements in society..Two such cases have caught headlines recently. The first is an attempt by Imran Khan's PTI government in KPK to undo the rational cleansing of the textbooks by the previous ANP government by reinserting nations of jihad and "Islamic" vice and virtue into the curricula. The second is an attempt by a section of the media to devalue the teaching of "comparative" religion in schools in which the values of relative compassion, mutual respect and human dignity common to all religions are emphasized. 
Editor, New Age Islam denounces Jihadi Literature in the Islamic World

The St. Petersburg Declaration (2007)
We are secular Muslims, and secular persons of Muslim societies. We are believers, doubters, and unbelievers, brought together by a great struggle, not between the West and Islam, but between the free and the unfree. // We affirm the inviolable freedom of the individual conscience. We believe in the equality of all human persons. // We insist upon the separation of religion from state and the observance of universal human rights. // We find traditions of liberty, rationality, and tolerance in the rich histories of pre-Islamic and Islamic societies. These values do not belong to the West or the East; they are the common moral heritage of humankind.  We see no colonialism, racism, or so-called "Islamaphobia" in submitting Islamic practices to criticism or condemnation when they violate human reason or rights...


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