Dilip Simeon's blog

NB: The game is quite easy to understand, really. The Sangh Parivar and its allies wish to set themselves up as sole representative of Hindu 'sentiment'; and the sole interpreter of what Hinduism is. They dream of becoming the Head Quarters of Religious Truth for the Indian people. It is a replica of the harassment of Turkish author and Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk by the Erdogan government. And it is similar to the punishment of Boris Pasternak  by the Soviet government for writing Dr Zhivago . This is why they make threats when something outside their ideology (and beyond their comprehension appears); and this is why they use the police and state power to crush the freedom of the mind. This is why they campaigned against A.K. Ramanujan's The Three hundred Ramayanas, and this is why they will not rest until all thought in India has been subjugated by their ideology. They will not succeed. My warmest congratulations to Geetanjali Shree.   DS Several noted Hindi litterat...

“ If to will good or evil has an effect on the world, it can only have one on the boundaries of the world, not on the facts, on what cannot be portrayed by language but can only be shown in language ...  There are two godheads: the world and my independent I. I am either happy or unhappy, that’s all. One can say: good or evil do not exist. Death is not an event in life. We do not live through it in the world. If eternity is understood not as infinite temporal duration, but as non-temporality, then one can say that he lives eternally who lives in the present.” Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) appears to be the only major work of philosophy to have been composed while the author was an active military combatant. René Descartes was serving in the Thirty Years War as a volunteer with the Dutch and then Bavarian armies when he first developed his philosophical ideas, but we don’t know whether he saw combat. Wittgenstein enlisted as an infantryman in the Austro...

Yogendra Yadav: Devanoora Mahadeva fills the silence An iconic Kannada literary figure, a towering public intellectual and a revered political activist in Karnataka. Shy and self-effacing to a point that you begin to wonder why he is in public life. He has a knack of disappearing from any public attention. As you suddenly notice his absence from the dais, someone helpfully explains: he may have stepped out for a smoke. Invariably and annoyingly late, even by my standards, Mahadeva is always a little out of sorts, a bit disheveled. His is not a carefully designed carelessness of a bohemian poet. It is just that his life has a different rhythm and radically different set of priorities than you would imagine a famous man to have. Oh, I forgot to say, he is Dalit. But now don’t rush to call him a Dalit writer or a Dalit activist. That would be a serious misrecognition, a category mistake. We don’t describe Shekhar Gupta as a bania intellectual, notwithstanding his touching, unadulterated f...

'Our times are testing the truth of Orwell's bitter aphorism "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past" ': From Guha's preface to his new book..     Historians always work in evolving political contexts that influence their knowledge and narratives. This cultural reality provides a framework for Sumit Guha’s imaginative analysis of how the collective memories that shape human societies are contingent and fragile because they are embedded within the changing institutional systems of social and political life.  In History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200–2000 , Guha analyzes the processes of remembering and forget- ting in South Asian cultures, but similar sociocultural patterns have also appeared in almost every other human society. Reviewed by Lloyd Kramer Historical knowledge serves numerous public needs, including the need for governments and social elites to justify their power and the need for cultural ...

There is an adjective that all too invitingly describes the wildly optimistic endeavours of the American book collector, the Hungarian-British explorer and the two Kashmiri pandits who, almost a century ago, took it upon themselves to translate Don Quixote into Sanskrit for the first time. Today, the same word might equally be applied to the efforts of the Bulgarian-born Indologist and Tibetologist who has rescued their text from decades of oblivion. In 1935, the wealthy American businessman and book collector Carl Tilden Keller – whose shelves already held Japanese, Mongolian and Icelandic translations of Cervantes ’s masterpiece – embarked on a quest to have some of the book rendered into an Indian language. To do so, he enlisted the help of his friend, Sir Marc Aurel Stein, an eminent orientalist, archaeologist and explorer who knew India well. “I am frank enough to admit that while I recognise the childishness of this desire of mine I am still extremely interested in having it...

In the depths of winter I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer - Albert Camus; The Stranger Heroism isn't much... happiness is more difficult - Letters to a German friend Before the terrifying prospects now available to humanity, we see even more clearly that peace is the only goal worth struggling for. This is no longer a prayer but a demand to be made by all peoples to their governments - a demand to choose definitively between hell and reason - Combat, August 8, 1945 the image above is taken from this blog: https://simonandfinn.com/2014/09/15/invincible-summer-camus/ The Almond Trees by Albert Camus Albert Camus: The Human Crisis (March 28, 1946) 'No cause justifies the murder of innocents' Sam Dresser: How Camus and Sartre split up over the question of how to be free Anu Kumar - The stories behind the story of Albert Camus’s ‘The Stranger’ Book review: Albert Camus‘ 'Algerian Chronicles’ // PDF of 'Reflections on the Guillotine' Book...

Last Man Standing - Fukuyama pines for that old-time liberalism    “IN WATCHING THE FLOW of events over the past decade or so, it is hard to avoid the feeling that something fundamental has happened in world history.” These were the seminal opening words of Francis Fukuyama’s article “The End of History?” published in the summer 1989 edition of The National Interest. Fukuyama, then a policy planner at the State Department, offered a simple, unoriginal, yet provocative thesis: humanity was on the precipice of a “post-historical world.” Rather than preparing for war, or for disorder at the mercy of communism’s coming demise, the world should prepare for a permanent end to imperial and ideological conflict. “The triumph of the West, of the Western idea,” Fukuyama wrote, was within sight. Our destiny, the world’s destiny, was liberal democracy: a Pax Liberalismus spurred by American global supremacy. Liberalism and Its Discontents by Francis Fukuyama Reviewed by Michael Brenes M...

ROLAND BARTHES IN CHINA    (Simon Leys; re-published in his book of essays:  The Hall of Uselessness , 2014) Sed perseverare ...  (To err is human, (but) to persist is diabolical) IN APRIL and May of 1974, Roland Barthes made a trip to China with a small group of his friends from the review Tel Quel. This visit coincided with a colossal, bloody purge launched nation-wide by the Maoist regime. This was the famous and sinister “campaign of denunciation of Lin Biao and Confucius” (pi Lin pi Kong). Upon his return, Barthes published an article in Le Monde which offered a strangely jolly view of this totalitarian violence: “Its very name - Pilin-Pikong in Chinese - has the joyful tinkle of a sleigh-bell, and the campaign comprises made-up games: a caricature, a poem, a children’s sketch during which, suddenly, a little girl in make-up assails the ghost of Lin Biao between two ballet dances: the political Text (and it alone) gives rise to these little ‘happenings.’” At...