Dilip Simeon's blog

An “in conversation” event with Nandini Sundar, Professor of sociology at the Delhi School of Economics. Topics covered will include recent protest movements, arrests of academics, journalists and activists, and the future of dissent in India. Introduction: Dr Gerald Roche, Senior Research Fellow, La Trobe Asia Speakers: Professor Nandini Sundar, Sociology, Delhi School of Economics Dr Ian Woolford, Hindi Studies, La Trobe University Protest, Dissent, and the Struggle for Justice in India | La Trobe Asia

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...

A Delhi University professor has been booked for an allegedly objectionable social media post on the claims of a ‘Shivling’ being found at the Gyanvapi mosque in Varanasi. Ratan Lal, an associate professor of history at the Hindu College, has been booked under IPC sections 153-A (promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion, race) and 295-A (deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings). In a statement Wednesday, DCP (North) Sagar Singh Kalsi said, “A complaint was received Tuesday night against Ratan Lal, professor of history at Hindu College, DU, regarding a deliberate and malicious post on Facebook that was intended to outrage reli­gious feelings by insulting a religion/reli­gious beliefs. A case under IPC sections 153-A/295-A has been registered at the Cyber Police Station, north district.” Speaking to ThePrint, Lal, who belongs to the Dalit community, said, “Critique of religion has been a part of discourse since the time of Gautam Buddh...

Should I be banned because I admire Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s masterpieces  Journey to the End of the Night ,  Death on the Installment Plan,  and  Castle to Castle , despite his virulent anti-Semitism…? Should I be banned for liking Joseph Heller’s  Catch-22,  which is rabidly misogynistic? Should I be banned for loving William Butler Yeats, who, like Ezra Pound… was a fascist collaborator? Should I be banned because I revere Hannah Arendt, whose attitudes towards African-Americans were paternalistic, at best, and arguably racist? Should I be banned because I cherish books by C.S. Lewis, Norman Mailer and D.H. Lawrence, who were homophobic? And let’s not even get started with the Bible… God repeatedly demands righteous acts of genocide, transforming the Nile into blood so the Egyptians will suffer from thirst. God sends swarms of locusts to torture the Egyptians, along with hail, fire and thunder to destroy all plants and trees. God orders the firstborn in ...

By Konstantin Akinsha    In early March, the University of Milan-Bicocca reacted to the Russian war against Ukraine by cancelling a seminar on Dostoevsky. This peculiar stand against Russian imperialism provoked a heated discussion among academics and intellectuals. The seminar was taught by the writer Paolo Nori, who instantly became famous. For a few days, the Italian intelligentsia treated the scrapping of the seminar as an event of utmost importance – eclipsing even the actual war in Ukraine. Those demanding the immediate reinstatement of the seminar had apparently forgotten their literary idol’s observation that ‘the happiness of the whole world is not worth the tear of a child’. Fortunately for everybody, Dostoevsky was quickly rehabilitated and the clumsy censors put to shame. As frivolous as the academic brouhaha may seem, it does raise an important question: what ought we to do now with Russian culture?... https://www.eurozine.com/dont-cry-for-me-dostoevsky/...

Margaret Thatcher hated the ‘British Bastard Corporation’, as her husband liked to call it. Coverage of the Falklands War was an inevitable flashpoint, with Thatcher raging against reporters’ references to ‘British’ forces rather than ‘our’ troops. The tabloid press sensed an opportunity to put the boot in, with the  Sun  wheeling out the tiredest of tropes by damning the BBC’s coverage as the work of ‘traitors in our midst’... The BBC: A People’s History -  by David Hendy This Is the BBC: Entertaining the Nation, Speaking for Britain? 1922-2022 -  by  Simon J. Potter . Reviewed by  Stefan Collini One of Anthony Eden’s several miscalculations over Suez was his assumption that he could bully the BBC – which he described in a moment of particular exasperation as ‘a nest of communists’ – into supporting the invasion by threatening to cut or curtail its External Services broadcasting. The director general, Ian Jacob, rig...

When my daughter asked why she couldn’t have an Alexa, I told her it is because Alexa steals your dreams and sells them    It is often said that people are entitled to their opinions. But are they really? Do you have a God-given right to believe that torture is good, or that the moon landings were faked? To the extent that opinions are not merely secret possessions but dispositions to act a certain way in society, they are everyone’s business. So, no, you don’t have an inalienable right to your dumb opinion. Freedom to Think: The Long Struggle to Liberate Our Minds . By Susie Alegre Reviewed by Steven Poole Unfortunately, that was also the position of the Spanish Inquisition and witch-hunters, who dreamed up vicious ways of attempting to uncover inner impiety. So these days we generally separate opinions (or beliefs) from the expression of them. Expression can be regulated, in the case of incitement to hatred, for example, but opinion is sacrosanct. It’s a fundamental freedom,...

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...

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...