Ira Pande: Forget, we won’t // Gurbachan Jagat: The emperor’s new clothes

By Dilip -

Today, for the first time in my life, I feel I have run out of words. This last fortnight has been so full of deaths and bereavements, of news of children dying before their old parents, or of friends who one had grown up with falling to the virus, that I have lost my faith and my tongue. I do not know what will become of us after this long nightmare is over but of this I am sure that if we survive, I will never take our happiness for granted. Nor will I ever foolishly believe that if one has been good and law-abiding, one has the right to a happy life. 

Over and over again, I recall that famous Buddhist parable of a mother asking the Buddha why her only child had been snatched away by death. He listened to her appeal to do something and calmly replied, ‘Get me a handful of grain from a home that has never experienced death, and I will bring your child back to life.’ This is one lesson that we can never internalise simply because death, after all, happens to other people. All of us know that we will die one day, but put off that day from our minds and everyday life. Christianity and most other faiths speak of how we can seek happiness, but it is only the Buddha and the Sufi saints who say that life is an unending saga of suffering enlivened only occasionally by joy.

Today I doubt if there is a single family that has not been touched by corona. Whether it is someone related by blood or a close friend, someone somewhere has left your life forever. Will we ever be able to celebrate Eid or Diwali or Christmas without that absence haunting us?...

https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/comment/forget-we-wont-253513

Gurbachan Jagat: The emperor’s new clothes

When a State cannot provide justice in its most fundamental form, it loses its right to rule. Where is justice when citizens have to pay thousands to carry their dead and buy slots for funerals? When they are turned away from basic care? What happened to the ESI hospitals to which every business contributes? The dead do not seek reimbursement, but there should be justice. The truth can no longer be clothed in lies — it’s out on streets for all to see; the delusion of our leaders, illusion they seek to cloak us with is laid bare…

https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/comment/the-emperors-new-clothes-253504

Gujarati Poet Parul Khakkar Blames 'Naked King' for Corpses Floating in the Ganga

Avay Shukla: LEST WE FORGET

A Call for National Mourning and a Proposal for a National Government. By Anil Nauriya

Society of the Spectacle / 'इमेज' - 'Image': A Poem on Deaths in the Age of Covid

Nandini Sen Mehra: And night has come upon my land

The Hindu priest struggling to cremate India’s Covid dead – video

पुजारी का कर्म

Pinjra Tod activist Natasha Narwal's father dies of Covid day before her bail hearing // That Monday will not come, Judge Sahib

Suhas Palshikar: A monumental failure of governance // ‘There should be no clampdown on information, people can voice grievances on social media’: Supreme Court

Naxalites should lay down their arms and challenge the ruling class to abide by the Constitution

The Supreme Court, Gandhi and the RSS

A whiff of evil

The emperor's masks: 'apolitical' RSS calls the shots in Modi sarkar

एक बात हमेशा ज़हन में सवाल खड़े करती है A question that stays with me... / Ravish Kumar's Speech at Berkeley (2019)

The Assassination of Mahatma Gandhi: Inquiry Commission Report (1969)

The Abolition of truth


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