Dilip Simeon's blog

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2013/jul/23/best-news-photographs-of-the-day-storms-weather-royal-baby-pope-brazil This tiny tree frog was photographed sheltering under a leaf in East Java,  Indonesia. Photograph: Penkdix Palme/Newsteam

Kafka: The Years of Insight By Reiner Stach  Kafka: The Decisive Years By Reiner Stach  Franz Kafka: The Poet of Shame and Guilt  By Saul Friedlander   reviewed by Kevin Jackson Lost in Transformation Someone must have been telling lies about K., for the popular image of him as the great Gloomy Gus of 20th-century letters (close rivals: Beckett, Cioran, maybe Céline) does not bear very much scrutiny. Consider this incident, which took place as he was dying of tuberculosis, and knew it. One day, when he was walking in a Berlin park, Kafka saw a little girl crying. He asked her why she was sad and she told him that she had lost her doll. Oh no, Kafka said, her doll was not lost - the toy was simply off on an exciting adventure. Understandably sceptical, the girl asked for proof. So Kafka went home and wrote a long, detailed letter from the doll, and gave it to the little girl the following day. Then, every day for the next three weeks, he gave her an additional le...

When he was 13 Edward was kidnapped by Ugandan rebels and forced to become a soldier in the Lord's Resistance Army. He survived the longest–running guerrilla war in modern history by being a trusted confidante of  Joseph Kony , the chief architect of the brutal insurgency.  Fourteen years later, with Kony on the run, Edward is returning to his childhood village, nervous about the reception he will receive after his role in terrorising his own people. For more than two decades about 30,000  children  abducted from northern  Uganda  provided the fuel for Kony's cult-like LRA. A self-styled mystic who claimed to channel a host of spirits, his hazy aims of seizing power and ruling Uganda according to the biblical 10 commandments collapsed after his forces were chased across the Nile and out of the country in 2006. Since then he has roamed east central  Africa 's forests with a band of a few hundred children kidnapped from neighbouring countries. ...

“People are people through other people” — Xhosa proverb “We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness, not by each other’s misery” — Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator Colleges of the Delhi University are in the grip of frenzy. With the university administration breaking promises about appointing permanent teachers against existing and newly sanctioned posts since 2009-10, large numbers of ‘ ad hoc ’ appointees are being shown the door as new  ad hocs  are poised to replace them. This has been happening systematically since 2012, but the scale on which it is being pursued this summer appears to be unprecedented. This is being done through the unfair practice of holding repeat interviews for the same jobs. Serving  ad hoc  teachers, it must be emphasized, have been selected at different times through due process for these jobs. This renders the repeat interviews nothing but forms for the exerci...

Those who care for the future of the religion should valorise the work of reformers who rid an ancient, ossified faith of its divisions, prejudices, and closed-mindedness A  bhadralok  friend of mine is of the view that the Government of India should celebrate every December 16 as Vijay Diwas, Victory Day, to mark the surrender in 1971 of the Pakistani forces in Dhaka to the advancing Indian Army. My friend argues that such a celebration would take Indians in general, and Hindus in particular, out of the pacifist, defeatist mindset that he claims has so crippled them. The triumph in Dhaka represents for him the finest moment in a millenia otherwise characterised by Indian (and more specifically Hindu) humiliation at the hands of foreigners. I was reminded of my friend’s fond fantasy when reading about the posters in Mumbai recently put up by members of the Bharatiya Janata Party. These carry portraits of a prominent BJP leader, with two accompanying slogans: ‘I AM A H...

Venkat Dhulipala is Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. He has an M.A in Political Science from University of Hyderabad, an M.A in South Asian Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a Ph.D in History from the University of Minnesota. He was a Research Fellow at the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas Austin 2010-2011 during which he completed his manuscript, Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam & the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial North India , forthcoming, Cambridge University Press 2014 His published essays include   Rallying the Qaum: The Muslim League in the United Provinces 1937-1939   (Modern Asian Studies- May 2010); and   A Nation-State Insufficiently Imagined? Debating Pakistan in Late Colonial North India , (IESHR July/Sept 2011). (Click here for a link to these articles) Professor Dhulipala will deliver four lectures in Delhi between Jul...

NB - ' Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing.  That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of "world history," but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened..' ( Friedrich Nietzsche) And we still think we need nationalism! and that religious and national communities need atom bombs to kill one another! Truly we humans are masters of self deception -DS ***************** A robotic  space  probe nearl...