Dilip Simeon's blog

NB : The flag of 'freedom and democracy' is wearing a bit thin on Western shoulders. The list of criminal interventions on other countries + nuclear tests in the Pacific + war crimes is very long indeed. Vietnam (1963-75); Iran (1953); Bikini atoll and Marina islands; Chile (1973), Argentina (support of military dictators); wars in Iraq; long standing support for the apartheid regime in South Africa; support for Yahya Khans military genocide in Bangladesh (East Pakistan, 1970-71); the assassination of Mujibur Rehman - these a re just a few of the prominent examples. And their permanent alliance with the brutal Saudi Arabian regime shows that democracy is not exactly on top of their diplomatic agenda. As to the CIA involvement in the global heroin trade , the less said the better. Maybe the freedom to die of heroin addiction is included in the western list of liberties Meanwhile the totalitarian disdain for justice, human rights and truth has been exemplified by the Soviet (and ...

“ 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...

Back in the 14th century, Sant Soyarabai was writing and  singing  abhangs about Vitthal, her god whom she could not visit in a temple because of her Dalit identity. Her abhangs were not just proclamations of her predilections towards god, they were also lessons in understanding caste hierarchy and the pain that was caused by untouchability and Brahminical systems. S Anand, co-founder of Delhi-based publishing house Navayana and author, came across Soyarabai through T he Ant Who Swallowed the Sun , a book by musician Neela Bhagwat and author Jerry Pinto, which translates and explains  poetry  by 10 women saints of Maharashtra from the Bhakti movement.  Kiti kiti bolu deva, kiti Karu aata heva  (O god how much more do I plead The jealousy I must bear till you heed)  Anand uses Jaijaivanti, a raga from Guru Granth Sahab that’s mostly represented as a combination of joy and sorrow, to convey this abhang, which talks of a god who does not care for her, but...

'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 ...

Driving down Prithviraj Road, one of New Delhi’s famously leafy avenues, I passed a lane that opened on to it. The street sign said “Aurangzeb Lane”. Aurangzeb Road might have morphed into A.P.J. Abdul Kalam Road, but the emperor lives on, if only in a little feeder lane.  Of the roads that commemorate Mughal emperors, all but one were named by the colonial State. The raj was keen to present itself as a successor to the Mughal State. Lutyens and Baker chose red and buff sandstone for the facades of their capitol buildings to allude to the signature red sandstone of the city’s great Mughal period monuments: Humayun’s Tomb, the Red Fort, Jama Masjid, Safdarjung’s Tomb, to name the most obvious candidates. The emperors aren’t even-handedly remembered though. Babur, the founder, has a tiny road to himself, best known for two  mithai  shops. Humayun Road is a connecting road mainly used to get to Junior Modern School and Khan Market. Akbar Road is a properly grand avenue. Shah...

Against The Dying of The Light : Bharat Ratna Frontier Gandhi, Badshah Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (1890-1988)   This note is being circulated for the attention of the Presidential candidates in the forthcoming elections for the offices of President and Vice President of India and the electoral college in this election. Recently, taking advantage of Covid lockdowns, the Haryana Government renamed Badshah Khan Hospital in Haryana after Atal Behari Vajpayee. This was done although the Frontier Gandhi, Badshah Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (1890-1988), was, apart from other things, a recipient of the Bharat Ratna. He was the only non-citizen apart from Nelson Mandela, to receive the Bharat Ratna. Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan went to prison in 1919 in the agitation against the Rowlatt Act in 1919 as did his 90-year old father Behram Khan in the same agitation. This was at a time when Atal Behari Vajpayee had not even been born. Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan was not merely an NWFP figure; he was, ...

J ust about every lousy U.S. foreign policy escapade from the 1950s to the late ‘70s traces back to the CIA. From the catastrophic1953 coup of Iranian president Mohammad Mossadegh, the 1954 regime change of Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz for daring to step on United Fruit’s toes, the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the many, some of them quite ridiculous, attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem’s demise, a possible right-wing Cuban link to the JFK assassination, the murder of Chilean general Rene Schneider and the overthrow of Chilean president Salvador Allende, the Watergate break-in and much, much more – the CIA’s fingerprints were all over these crimes. It got so bad that two high-level centrist government officials called for scrapping the CIA: senator Patrick Moynihan in 1995 and president Harry Truman in 1963. They were right.  A new book proves it. Jefferson Morley’s  Scorpion’s Dance, the President, the Spymaster and Watergate ,  detail...

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...