Dilip Simeon's blog

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...

NB: The Sangh Parivar is obsessed with the goal of rectifying history. They are still fighting with the Mughals; still dreaming of military glory while the world burns. At some point people will understand that Akhand Bharat and Hindu Rashtra are mutually incompatible ideals, but in the meantime millions will suffer the cruelties and injustice of communal hatred and violence. Communal politics and each and every variety is disguised atheism, it only wears the mask of religion. But some lessons come very late.  DS Javed Anand: The vishwaguru fantasy So which is the real Mohan Bhagwat? The one who, while addressing swayamsevaks at the RSS headquarters in Nagpur on June 2, advised Hindus not to go looking for a ‘Shivling’ in every mosque? Or the one who in the course of the same speech squarely blamed Indian Muslims for repeatedly testing the patience of Hindus with their provocative words and deeds? Hindu society does not accept any form of extremism, he asserted, while claiming tha...

If biology was the soil of fascism, history and aesthetics were the manure.. Percy Shelley called poets the “unacknowledged legislators of the world.” No poet sought acknowledgment more enthusiastically than Ezra Pound. No poet legislated so ambitiously or disastrously, either. Pound was the impresario of Modernism. He stripped the Victorian padding from the verse of T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats, launched magazines and the Imagist movement, and published the first chapters of Joyce’s “Ulysses.” He was also a fascist and fanatical anti-Semite who propagandized on the radio for Mussolini’s regime. After the war, Pound’s friends and fans, Eliot among them, convinced the American authorities that he was not bad, just mad. He was lucky not to be executed as a traitor. Lauren Arrington’s “Poets of Rapallo” is a fascinating, intricate study of Pound’s first steps on the road to perdition, and the cast of fellow travelers, Yeats among them, who went part of the way with him and then covered their...

NB:  This is the kind of detailed documentation that we require in India. Those interested in studying the jurisprudence of lawlessness further could read William Scheuerman's book:  The End of Law . DS Chris Hedges: Fascists in our midst Supreme Court rulings, including the overturning of Roe v. Wade, herald the ascendancy of Christian fascism in the United States... The Supreme Court is relentlessly funding and empowering Christian fascism. It not only overturned Roe v. Wade, ending a constitutional right to an abortion, but ruled on June 21 that Maine may not exclude religious schools from a state tuition program. It has ruled that a Montana state program to support private schools must include religious schools. It ruled that a 40-foot cross could remain on state property in suburban Maryland . It upheld the Trump administration regulation allowing employers to deny birth control coverage to female employees on religious grounds .  It ruled that employment discrim...

NB : A very well written and timely reminder. My two caveats are 1) with the word back ; and 2) with the positioning of the word crisis . It is not 'back', because after the Napoleonic wars it never went away; and a more appropriate title description  of our time (with due respect to Gurudev), would be the civilisation of crisis . DS In May, 1941 Rabindranath Tagore was in such poor health that nobody knew for sure if he would be able to take part in his birthday celebrations that year. In the end he did, though he was still too weak to read out himself his birthday message to his well-wishers, as he did every year in Santiniketan. The poet’s last message to the world, then, was not delivered in his own voice, and this adds to the poignancy that permeates his message. For  Crisis in Civilisation  can truly be called his last testament. One of the greatest men to have ever lived was bidding goodbye to the world, and was doing so at a time when everything around him seemed ...

NB : Amidst all the flames of outrage, let me add a small reminder taken from daily life: it is not merely the speaking of factual data that counts, what counts more is the manner of speech, the way in which we speak what we think is the truth. In all religious traditions, there are theories (often called myths) about the Divine, which can be spoken with reverence, with skepticism , or with contempt. Whether it is someone walking on water, flying up to heaven, making the dead come back to life etc; all miracles mean something to the believer; and can teach something to non-believers.  But when we humiliate people, especially in a charged atmosphere, we are playing with sentiment. And whereas playing with popular emotions has become the preferred mode of politics all over the world, it is behind the scenes that we need to look; where news has become propaganda and social media has become a blood sport.  The name of the game is as follows: number-crunching + policy lobbying for ...

NB : Our honourable senior judges may kindly let us know if they have totally abandoned their constitutional duty to exercise oversight on the actions of the executive. In face of their silence, may we assume that this kind of hooliganism by the Yogi government will be allowed to continue with impunity? Should we also assume that they do not consider the illegal destruction of citizens homes to be a serious matter worthy of judicial cognisance? Are we to assume that the Indian Constitution has been suspended for the duration of this RSS/BJP  government? What should we do? Pray? DS The bulldozer brought in by the Uttar Pradesh government in Prayagraj on Sunday to raze the house of Mohammad Javed is part of a familiar playbook: the issue is under substantive challenge in three courts, the Supreme Court, Allahabad High Court and the Madhya Pradesh High Court. And in all three, the cases are in a limbo. The bulldozing of houses, under the pretext of alleged violations of the state...