Dilip Simeon's blog

The Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) administration and the security forces are doing themselves a great disservice by creating an extremely coercive eco-system for journalists in the Union Territory (UT). Those administering the UT are rapidly losing out on the critical feedback that could make the system more stable. An apocryphal story amongst journalists in Srinagar is that a senior official holds that of "five Ms" that are the 'cause' of the Kashmir issue - Masses, Mosques, Maulavis, Militants and Media, all have been tamed in the last year except the media. People have been prevented from reaching out to the media as they had begun to do by staging protests outside Srinagar's Press Colony. Local journalists in Srinagar claim that they are routinely questioned about their sources, and if they refuse to reveal them, their reports are dubbed 'fake news'. They allege that the security forces often ask journalists to hand over their cell phones to examine th...

Professor Madhavan Palat's lecture on the Ukraine War: Regional History & Current Crisis was delivered on Tuesday March 29, at Habitat Centre.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PTtMaXOCho Madhavan K. Palat read history at the Universities of Delhi and Cambridge. Thereafter he specialized in late Imperial Russian history and took the D.Phil. degree at the University of Oxford. He taught history at the Jawaharlal Nehru University from 1974 to 2004, was Visiting Professor in Imperial Russian History at the University of Chicago in 2006, National Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study in Shimla 2010-2011, and Editor of the Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru 2011-2019. Chair: Cmde. C. Uday Bhaskar, Director, Society For Policy Studies. ******************************************* Madhavan Palat lectures on Dostoevsky Madhavan Palat: Utopia and Dystopia in Revolutionary Russia Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Historian of Decline and Prophet of Revival by Madhavan Palat Ser...

If you’re unlucky enough to reside in a town where data centers house computer servers storing everything from financial data for giant corporations to military secrets, you’re likely to find that a loud, whining noise becomes life’s agonizing background. The sound peaks and subsides, but it’s always there, never allowing you to fully relax. Eventually, the stress of this kind of ambient noise can wear you down,  doubling your risk of mental illness , as well as  increasing your risk of diseases like heart attack and stroke . Living in an economy dominated by neoliberal principles can feel kind of like that: a background hum of constant psychological stress. The sense of precariousness never really goes away. Instead collectively of sharing the risks of life, we’re increasingly saddled with the heavy burdens of existing in an overwhelmingly complex, modern world. We’re lonely individuals, fighting to stay afloat no matter what our situation. There are a few lucky winners, su...

The entire archive of On Contact, the Emmy-nominated show I hosted for six years for RT America and RT International, has been disappeared from YouTube. Gone is the interview with Nathaniel Philbrick on his book about George Washington. Gone is the discussion with Kai Bird on his biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Gone is my exploration with Professor Sam Slote from Trinity College Dublin of James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” Gone is the show with Benjamin Moser on his biography of Susan Sontag. Gone is the show with Stephen Kinzer on his book on John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles. Gone are the interviews with the social critics Cornel West, Tariq Ali, Noam Chomsky, Gerald Horne, Wendy Brown, Paul Street, Gabriel Rockwell, Naomi Wolff and Slavoj Zizek. Gone are the interviews with the novelists Russell Banks and Salar Abdoh. Gone is the interview with Kevin Sharp, a former federal judge, on the case of Leonard Peltier. Gone are the interviews with economists David Harvey and Richard Wolff. Gon...

NB: Here are two reviews of The Kashmir Files, with different interpretations. Readers are welcome to their own conclusions. Since this is a matter I have spoken and written about for many years, I attach below a selection of my posts beneath the reviews, without further comment. DS The Kashmir Files: Cinema As Testimony. Siddhartha Gigoo K-Files impact: Kashmiri Pandit interests take a back seat. Bharat Bhushan (The second article may be inaccessible, so I attach the text beneath the list of posts -  DS ) ********************************************* Posts from my blog What is to be Undone : (This post is about the February 2016 student meeting on Kashmir in JNU that led to a major controversy and police cases) Kashmir - 16 yrs on, Wandhama victims ... Superflous people - review of 'Our Moon has blood clots' Kashmiri Pandit Sangharsh Samiti Press Release ... The Other Kashmiri Dissenters ​ Kashmir Oral History Kashmiri Pandits Stage Protest March in Srinagar P...

The Associated Press reports  that the Conger/Glenzer ice shelf in East Antarctica has collapsed. The event was caught on satellite video, and it is the first such collapse known to have occurred on the east coast of Antarctica, which had been thought to be more stable and less affected by human-caused global heating than the west. The ice shelf was holding back two glaciers,  Conger  and  Glenzer , named for American naval personnel who helped survey the area in the late 1940s. The glaciers collapsed along with the ice shelf. As I observed in January, “Global heating is being driven by 100 corporations supplying and encouraging the burning of petroleum, coal and natural gas, which emit billions of dangerous heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere annually. We are setting the sky afire every time we drive our cars or heat our homes.”… https://www.juancole.com/2022/03/climate-antarctica-collapses.html Murtaza Hussain: Industrialized Militaries & Climate Emergenc...

The scenes of the horrible destruction that Russia is inflicting on Ukraine’s civilian cities, from Kharkiv to Mariupol, and the killing of nearly  1,000 civilians , including nearly 100 children, have tugged at the world’s heart strings - and rightly so. Nineteen years ago, when the George W. Bush regime unleashed its “Shock and Awe” campaign on Iraqi cities, there was more celebration in the US press than condemnation.  John T. Correll at Air Force Magazine wrote in 2003,  , “The spectacular bombardment the world watched on television the first night was part of a broader attack that sent 1,000 strike sorties against military targets in Baghdad, Kirkuk, Mosul, and elsewhere.”… https://www.juancole.com/2022/03/deplores-russias-spectacular.html JUAN COLE: The US would be on firmer ground declaring Putin a War Criminal if George W. Bush had been Tried / Aditya Chakrabortty: Western values? They enthroned the monster who is shelling Ukrainians today Sergei Loznitsa, the Ukr...