Dilip Simeon's blog

Prime Minister Abe and his political base are members of a Shinto cult and political lobby,  Nippon Kaigi , which believes that Japan must shed the shackles of a “U.S. imposed” democratic constitution, popular sovereignty, basic human rights, pacifism, and gender equality. Abe and most of his cabinet members believe that the Japanese people are divine descendants of the gods, World War II was justified, and that emperor worship should be restored. The name of Japan’s new imperial era,  Reiwa , was announced on April Fools’ Day with great fanfare and a great big linguistic lie. The official government party line is that it translates as “Beautiful Harmony,” but what it means literally is more Orwellian: “Commanded Peace.” Of course, a certain portion of the Japanese population realizes that the explanation given for the new imperial name is not the truth, but they probably were not surprised. Japan has grown numb to the deceptions and lies of its elected rulers. As of January

You cannot understand politics in America until you understand that in the Democratic party, which ostensibly represents the left side of our nation’s political spectrum, there are a significant number of people who genuinely believe that  Joe Biden  is the best possible presidential nominee. Their belief is not cynical, or at least not wholly cynical. His constituency is real. It is not illuminating to think of them just as centrists, arguing for the gentlest sprinkling of sugar over the top of America’s poison. It’s better to think of them as zombies: the product of three decades of self-serving, triangulating brainwashing. They are the Democrats who had their eyelids propped open and were forced to watch the Clinton era, year after year after year. It is not so much that they do not, deep down, harbor a vague wish for a better world; it is that, like stray dogs dining exclusively on garbage, life has taught them that this is the best that they will ever get. Consider what i

In November 2011, a small Renaissance painting known as the Salvator Mundi (“Saviour of the World”) went on show at the National Gallery. It was a compelling, moody, somewhat odd picture: a half-length figure of Christ with ringlets of auburn hair, holding a transparent crystal orb. Even more compelling was the label, describing it as a newly discovered work by Leonardo da Vinci. This attribution, at the upper end of the art world’s Richter scale, was controversial for various reasons, not least because – contrary to National Gallery policy – it radically enhanced the market value of a privately owned artwork. Its owners were at this point mysterious: an American “consortium” was mentioned. They were, in fact, two mid-table New York dealers, Robert Simon and Alex Parish, who had bought it in 2005 on an intuitive whim, heavily overpainted and in poor condition, from a small auction house in New Orleans. They paid $1,175. Cleaned, stripped and painstakingly restored by Dianne Modestini

For most of my adult life I’ve railed against “corporate capitalism”, “consumer capitalism” and “crony capitalism”. It took me a long time to see that the problem is not the adjective but the noun. While some people have rejected capitalism gladly and swiftly, I’ve done so slowly and reluctantly.  Part of the reason was that I could see no clear alternative: unlike some anti-capitalists, I have never been an enthusiast for state communism. I was also inhibited by its religious status. To say “capitalism is failing” in the 21st century is like saying “God is dead” in the 19th: it is secular blasphemy. It requires a degree of self-confidence I did not possess. But as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to recognise two things. First, that it is the system, rather than any variant of the system, that drives us inexorably towards disaster. Second, that you do not have to produce a definitive alternative to say that capitalism is failing. The statement stands in its own right. But it also dema

OPEN STATEMENT BY FORMER CIVIL SERVANTS – CHARGE-SHEETED TERROR ACCUSED AS PARTY CANDIDATE  Our group of former civil servants of the All India and Central Services has no affiliation with any political party and is firmly committed to the Constitution of India. We write to express our disbelief and dismay at the candidature of Pragya Thakur for the Bhopal Lok Sabha seat. This decision could have been dismissed as yet another example of political expediency but for the enthusiastic endorsement by no less a person than the Prime Minister of India, who has termed her candidature as a symbol of our civilisational heritage.  As if it were not enough to nominate a person who is undergoing trial for acts of terror (the Malegaon Bomb Blast Case), Pragya Thakur, who is out on bail on medical grounds, has used the political platform she has been provided not just to propound her brand of bigotry, but also to insult the memory of Shri Hemant Karkare , the IPS officer who laid down his l

NB : The CJI's conduct in this matter is prima-facie as shameful as that of his predecessor . If the legal fraternity allows this abuse of authority to bypass established norms of justice and due process, it is conniving at the destruction of the justice system. DS The Attorney General and Solicitor General seem to have forgotten that there exists something called separation of powers, demarcating clear boundaries between the executive and the judiciary. Their rush to defend the CJI is deeply troubling, for it gives the appearance of a possible quid pro quo between the government and the accused. Nobody is asking that people presume guilt or blindly believe the accuser. But objectivity demands that we take a stand on Saturday’s proceedings and make it clear that they have no place in a constitutional democracy. If there is any threat to the integrity of the judiciary, it is not from such allegations, but from within. On Saturday, April 20, normally a holiday for the  Supreme

In democracies, many wrong things do happen. But this is too blatant. An accused facing trial is presented as a party candidate and a national hero who sacrificed his life is denigrated. Will such irresponsible behaviour on the part of rulers not harm society or its secular fabric? How insensitive and apoplectic do we want to make our society? Sadhvi Pragya  Thakur, the  BJP ’s candidate from the Bhopal parliamentary seat, made an irresponsible and controversial statement on April 18. While addressing a meeting of party workers, she targeted the late Hemant Karkare, who had arrested her for her alleged role in the Malegaon blast case in 2008. She claimed that it was her curse  (“tera sarvnash hoga” ), which ended Karkare’s life soon afterwards. The resultant controversy and its fallout in the press, including the withdrawal of her statement, took me back in time by nearly 11 years. About a month before his death, I discussed the issue of violence by Hindu reactionary groups or th

As the  floodwaters slowly recede  and  cholera breaks out  here in Mozambique, I recall the iconic image of the mum and her “miracle baby born in a tree” being winched from the branches above the swirling flood waters in Mozambique almost 20 years ago. A  similar story  has emerged in this crisis. Baby Sara arrived in the world in the branches of a mango tree, mother Amelia also desperately clinging to her two-year-old son. It took two days for them to be rescued. They survived. Two mothers, a generation apart, encapsulating the peril, terror and indignities suffered by a nation at the hands of nature. Their daughters, Rosita, who all being well is now a young woman perhaps with children of her own, and baby Sara, both arrived into a world with scarce and inadequate health facilities, limited clean water, food and shelter, and increased risk of violence within temporary shelters. Can their treetop births ensure the eyes of the world will focus on an impoverished country dev

My first reaction was panic. As I woke up to the  horrific scenes from churches and hotels in  Sri Lanka ; to news of the dead, dying and injured, on a day of Christian celebration, I desperately rang loved ones, checked on cousins, uncles, aunts and friends. As further explosions occurred, and more deaths were reported, my heart pounded. Finally, I learned that my relatives were all OK, and I began to reflect on an atrocity that must not be allowed to divide Sri Lankans and take us back to the  darkest days of the recent past . A man weeps outside a hospital in Batticaloa, Photo: Lakruwan Wanniarachchi/ AFP/Getty Images I was born in Britain to Sri Lankan parents and have a Sri Lankan husband. As a Muslim I know too well the feeling of shock and fear when someone has tried to harm you in a place of worship. I felt today as I felt when I woke to news of the attack on worshippers in Christchurch, New Zealand, which left  51 people killed  and dozens injured. Those Muslims had gone

It didn’t take long for the death threats to start. Alexandria Villaseñor, a 13-year-old environmental activist, had just been featured in an Agence France-Presse article republished by Breitbart News about dozens of students staging a “die-in” at United Nations headquarters in New York. Villaseñor was protesting that day in mid-March for the same reason that she decided to start a school strike four months earlier: to demand that world leaders quit dragging their feet and take swift action to combat global climate change . 'It's our time to rise up': youth climate strikes held in 100 countries Extinction Rebellion is a new, youthful politics that will change Britain “Don’t stage it, just die,” one Breitbart reader commented on the right-wing publication’s website. “I would be more impressed if they doused theselves with gas and set themselves on fire,” wrote another. “You don’t deserve a future, you pathetic halfwit,” said a third. The repugnant online tro

Authorities in Sri Lanka have launched a massive security operation and imposed a curfew after a wave of bombs in churches and hotels in Sri Lankakilledmore than 150 people and injured hundreds. The eight blasts, some of which officials said were suicide bomb attacks, appeared timed to cause maximum casualties among worshippers attending Easter services. In one church, St. Sebastian’s in Katuwapitiya, north of the capital, Colombo, more than 50 people had been killed, a police official said. Much of the church roof was blown out in the explosion, with roof tiles and splintered wood littering the floor and pools of blood in between wounded worshippers. In total, three churches and four hotels were targeted. The other explosion was in a house in Colombo, authorities said... read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/21/sri-lanka-explosions-80-believed-injured-in-blasts-at-two-churches

Up until the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1991, foreigners were not allowed to visit the beautiful Dalmatian island of Vis, then home to a major naval base. Two years ago it was the location for  Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again , doubling as the fictional Greek island of Kalokairi. One way of looking at the transformation from military redoubt to Hollywood idyll is as a triumph of freedom of movement over draconian restrictions. But that’s not how the Croatian philosopher Srećko Horvat sees the resulting media attention, rising real estate prices and what he calls the “tourist occupation” of Vis, where he now lives. “Where once there was a sustainable local community,” he writes in his new book,  Poetry from the Future , “there are weekending easyJet tourists; where fishermen’s boats once rode at anchor, now luxury yachts are moored.” You probably haven’t heard of Horvat, though you will have heard of plenty of people who have. He’s friends with the former Greek finance minister  Y

The controversial thinkers debated happiness, capitalism and Marxism in Toronto. It was billed as a meeting of titans – and that it was not. But it did reveal one telling commonality.   They needed enemies, needed combat, because in their solitudes, they had so little to offer.  Both of these men know that they are explicitly throwbacks. They do not have an answer to the real problems that face us: the environment and the rise of China as a successful capitalist state without democracy. (China’s success makes a joke out of the whole premise of the debate: the old-fashioned distinction between communism and capitalism.) Neither can face the reality or the future. Therefore they retreat. The event was billed as “the debate of the century”, “The Rumble in the Realm of the Mind”, and it did have the feel of a heavyweight boxing match: Jordan Peterson, local boy, against the slapdash Slovenian  Slavoj Žižek , considering “Happiness: Capitalism vs Marxism” in Toronto. Peterson, in his o

The BJP’s 2019 election drive has shaken off every association with the 2014 poll campaign. To put it baldly, 2019 is all about an excision of the memory of 2014. Seeing the party’s campaign posters, one gets an unerring feeling that the very mention of the last Lok Sabha campaign has it running scared. The BJP has stuck new posters over those of five years ago – new issues are being marketed and the forced taglines are glaringly obvious. The analogy that comes to mind is of a schoolboy who fails his exams and comes home saying that many students have failed, because their answer sheets had not been properly evaluated. Similarly, in Modi’s case, his residual political success comes from the fact that opposition politicians and their parties too have nothing to show except failure. 'Stop Parties From Using Armed Forces For Political Gain': Over 150 Veterans Write To President Karnataka BJP Uses Fake Letter to Allege Congress ‘Wanted to Divide Hindus’ There is on

What does it mean to live in a world in which history has rusted under the monstrous weight of the permanent now?  It is no coincidence that the Trump-led right has harnessed this history-resistant style of politics to launch an all-out assault on history as we know it. From Trump’s never-ending lies and attacks on the media to the GOP’s ramped-up war on academia, from white supremacist rallies defending Confederate monuments to conservative pundits discounting the role of slavery in the Civil War, there is, indeed, a war going on over the terrain of remembrance.. Among the prizes at stake in the endless war of politics is history itself. The battle for power is always a battle to determine who gets remembered, how they will be recalled, where and in what forms their memories will be preserved. In this battle, there is no room for neutral parties: every history and counter-history must fight and scrap and claw and spread and lodge itself in the world, lest it be forgotten or forcibly

Hannah Arendt’s unfinished book on Marx offers a timely philosophical dialogue for our era of economic precarity. The Modern Challenge to Tradition: Hannah Arendt:  edited by Barbara Hahn and James McFarland, with Ingo Kieslich and Ingeborg Nordmann. Reviewed by GEOFFREY WILDANGER In this era of economic precarity and resurgent authoritarianism, it is unsurprising that both Karl Marx and Hannah Arendt occupy a central place in many readers’ minds—and a lingering one on their nightstands. Sales of Capital boomed following the 2008 financial crisis, and Donald Trump offers good reason to read The Origins of Totalitarianism. It is fitting, then, that the new Critical Edition of Arendt’s complete works begins with this, a volume of fragments from an unfinished book originally planned to be called Karl Marx and the Tradition of Political Thought . Sales of Capital boomed following the 2008 financial crisis, and Donald Trump offers good reason to read The Origins of Totalitarianism. Se

It says something about our historical moment – or about the intrinsic limits of our capacity for wonder – that the image of this physical reality is so effortlessly normalised. We probably do less stargazing, as a species, than at any previous moment in human history, but the old reflex to anthropomorphise the universe, to insist on ourselves in the centre of it, persists...As TS Eliot observed in his meditation on Einstein’s space-time continuum in Burnt Norton, “humankind cannot bear too much reality”. The science proves the black hole is way beyond most of our understanding, but the evidence now in front of our eyes reminds us that the simplest principle of the universe remains the hardest for us to grasp: it’s not about us. A f ew years ago, during a period of insomnia, I briefly got into the habit of contributing to the online project  Galaxy Zoo . I would log on to a website that presented, one after another, singular images of tens of thousands of galaxies observed by the

There are thousands of street food carts in New Delhi. But only one has the opening lines of Riyazat Ullah Khan’s poem Wazoodiyat on the side: Where can the pauper keep his pain of existence? He has no container but a heart. The sticker bearing the couplet is from a campaign called  StickLit , which seeks to make literature more accessible by placing quotes in public spaces. Nidhin Kundathil and Manoj Pandey had the idea for the project while contemplating the advertisements, posters and billboards that are consumed almost subliminally on Indian streets. “We thought of turning this [visual] experience on its head to create a completely new and refreshing alternative for passersby – [one] which was not just selling something, for a change,” says Pandey, 32, a freelance writer in Darjeeling. The idea subsequently evolved: they would make what they call the world’s largest library – “the largest repository of good literature in public spaces: a library that’s free for all”.

A year ago I was in an Israeli prison, denied my basic rights and stripped of my childhood. The crime that led to eight months of incarceration was not mine, but that of  Israel ’s continued occupation of  Palestine . As with so many child prisoners who are subjected to the horrors of Israeli military detention, one of the toughest daily struggles was being separated from my family. Last week, my family was torn apart once again: this time, Israeli forces came and took away my  15-year-old brother Mohammed . This is the price we pay for Israel’s occupation. Every mother and father is forced to live in fear of their children being the next target. Palestinians in the West Bank are subjected to military law, which is used as a tool to repress, silence, and prevent our resistance to occupation. We do not have equal rights to the Israeli settlers who live on stolen land in our neighbourhoods. This prevents us from living normal lives and threatens our existence, but it is protected

NCERT had drawn widespread criticism in March for its decision to delete a chapter on the Channar Revolt, the 19th-century agitation by lower-caste Nadar women in the erstwhile kingdom of Travancore from the Class 9 history textbook in Kerala. The Channar Revolt, or the upper cloth movement, which took place between 1813 and 1859, saw Nadar women defying diktats imposed by the upper castes that lower caste men and women must not clothe their upper bodies. In the guise of lessening the student’s burden, caste struggles, farm labour and colonialism were dropped from students textbooks in the second textbook review by the current government. In the latest textbook review, the NCERT has removed three chapters from ‘India and the Contemporary World – II’ history textbook of class 10   beginning this academic year. Since the current government came to power, this is the second textbook revision on the basis of the curriculum rationalisation exercise undertaken by the HRD Minister Prakas

Astra Taylor hasn’t always been interested in democracy. “There was this vagueness about the word that just seemed to be not just corruptible but almost inherently corrupt,” says the writer, film-maker and activist. “I was attracted to words like liberation, emancipation, equality, revolution, socialism. Any other word would get my pulse going more than democracy.” For her, democracy was a word imperial America used to sell free markets and push its agenda. Yet Taylor, a lifelong activist, says that she also always felt there was “a contradiction” inherent in democracy that puzzled her. For all the cynicism the word attracted, she could see there was power in an idea meant to strengthen the people, a power that she explores in her new documentary, What Is Democracy?, and her upcoming book, Democracy May Not Exist, But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone. In the US, the election of Donald Trump in 2016 sundered the body politic, while that same year, the Brexit referendum split the UK.

The world’s fattest species of parrot has had a record-breaking breeding season in  New Zealand , with scientists saying the fortunes of the critically-endangered bird are finally turning around. There are only 147 adult kākāpō alive today, although a few hundred years ago they were one of New Zealand’s most common birds, before being hunted to the brink of extinction, killed by introduced pests, and losing their forest homes to farming. The nocturnal, flightless parrot is one of New Zealanders favourite birds, and is known for its charismatic nature and owl-like face. Because the population is so small every kākāpō has a name – including Ruth, Hoki, Suzanne and Zephyr – and is subject to one of the most intensive management programmes of any species in the world. Infertility and in-breeding have been long-term issues for the birds’ reproductive efforts. But this year 76 kākāpō chicks have hatched and 60 are expected to make it to adulthood, the result of heavy seeding in

India has one of the highest female foeticide incidents in the world. The female child population in the age group of 0-6 years declined from 78.83 million in 2001 to 75.84 million in 2011. During the period 1991-2011, the child sex ratio (0-6 years) declined from 945 to 914. Apart from Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques (Regulation and Prevention of Misuse) Act, 1994 (PNDT Act) to address the issue of sex-selective abortion, India also enacted the Medical Termination of Pregnancy (MTP) Act in 1971 to regulate access to safe abortions. The MTP Act of 1971, amended in 2002, allows abortion up to 20 weeks of pregnancy in cases where “the continuance of the pregnancy would involve a risk to the life of the pregnant woman or of grave injury to her physical or mental health”. The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare has acknowledged that illegal abortions still outnumber legal abortions and thousands of women die every year due to complications resulting from unsafe abortions. Accordin

From a 15th-century coronation of an English king, to the liberation of Paris in 1944 and this year’s yellow vest protests, the 850-year old cathedral  has stood witness to the sweep of history . For many Parisians, Notre Dame is the very heart of their city. Thousands of them looked on on Monday night as a  fire ravaged the Gothic monument .. see photos and images: https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2019/apr/16/notre-dame-through-the-ages-in-pictures

NB : We owe thanks to these retired officers for maintaining the dignity and secular values of the Indian Armed Forces. The Armed Forces are not the political mascots of the Sangh Parivar, and it is time the shameless misbehaviour of the RSS and its front organisations - of which the BJP is one - is called out. Hopefully the President and the Election Commission India will take note. Sad to say the previous President did not cover himself with glory. DS In an unprecedented move, over 150 veterans of India’s armed forces wrote to the President on the eve of the first phase of the Lok Sabha election urging him to stop parties from politicising the military and its symbols.  The letter, which was almost marked to the Chief Election Commission, was signed by three former Army chiefs (General Sunith Francis Rodrigues, General Shankar Roychowdhury, General Deepak Kapoor), four former Navy chiefs (Admiral Laxminarayan Ramdas, Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat, Admiral Arun Prakash, Admiral Suresh

With China's assault on scores of leading academics and intellectuals, business as usual is no longer possible.  The recent mass arrests of scores of leading academics and intellectuals in western China is one of many indications that the Chinese regime's current campaign against the native Uighur, Kazakh and other peoples is already a genocide. It is now clearly engaged in "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such," as defined in the 1948 international Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The Uighur Human Rights Project recently counted  386 targeted academics, artists and other prominent intellectuals  as having been arrested by the regime. They probably are all, if still alive, in the concentration camps in the Xinjiang region, built there since 2017. The Chinese regime is clearly carrying out such mass arrests of famous figures, alongside hundreds of

Astronomers have taken the first ever image of a black hole, which is located in a distant galaxy. It measures 40 billion km across - three million times the size of the Earth - and has been described by scientists as "a monster". The black hole is 500 million trillion km away and was photographed by a network of eight telescopes across the world. Details have been published today in Astrophysical Journal Letters. It was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a network of eight linked telescopes. Prof Heino Falcke, of Radboud University in the Netherlands, who proposed the experiment, told BBC News that the black hole was found in a galaxy called M87. "What we see is larger than the size of our entire Solar System," he said. "It has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun. And it is one of the heaviest black holes that we think exists. It is an absolute monster, the heavyweight champion of black holes in the Universe." The image sho

Homo luzonensis  fossils found in Luzon island cave,   dating back up to 67,000 years A new species of ancient human, thought to have been under 4ft tall and adapted to climbing trees, has been discovered in the  Philippines , providing a twist in the story of human evolution. The specimen, named  Homo luzonensis , was excavated from Callao cave on Luzon island in the northern Philippines and has been dated to 50,000-67,000 years ago – when our own ancestors and the  Neanderthals  were spreading across Europe and into Asia. Florent Détroit, of the Natural History Museum in Paris and the paper’s first author, said the discovery provided the latest challenge to the fairly straightforward prevalent narrative of human evolution.  It was once thought that no humans left Africa until about 1.5 million years ago, when a large-bodied ancient human called  Homo erectus  set off on a dispersal that ultimately allowed it to occupy territory spanning Africa and Spain, China and Indonesia

As voters in 20 states prepare to cast their ballots for 91 Lok Sabha seats in the first of seven phases of the general election on April 11, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s desperation is evident. In this make or break election, he is virtually begging for votes in the name of the Balakot airstrike and the Pulwama martyrs. It is as if the Indian Air Force fighter pilots and the Central Reserve Police Force martyrs were contesting the election on his behalf. Appealing to an estimated 15 million first-time voters, he said in Aurangabad: “When you earn your first salary usually you don’t keep it for yourself. You want to dedicate it to your mother or sister. Similarly, you can dedicate your vote for the Balakot airstrike, for the Pulwama attack victims… Will you dedicate your vote to the brave men who conducted the Balakot strikes, to the CRPF men who lost their lives in the Pulwama attack?” Prime Minister Modi’s attempt to leverage the death and bravery of the security forces is noth

The Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art and Ardha Matra Collective are happy to invite you to: Le Jardin de Lorixa: The Story of a Forgotten Herbal A talk by Prof. Kapil Raj, moderated by Samuel Berthet 6:30 pm | Friday, 12 April 2019 | FICA Reading Room View this flier in your browser  at FICA Reading Room F-213/E-2, 2nd Floor, Old Mehrauli-Badarpur Road, Lado Sarai, New Delhi 110030 Location pin FREE ENTRY Prof. Kapil Raj will present a botanical treaty composed in Odisha and Bengal between the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century. For the European nations that were engaged in the conquest of the world in the early modern era, making inventories of local flora was held in priority. Voluminous herbals were prepared by the Portuguese, the Dutch and the English. A French surgeon based in Orissa and then in Chandernagore at the turn of the 18th Century also spent more than three decades, and a personal fortune, to complete a simi