Dilip Simeon's blog

What if Nathuram Godse had missed? What if Gandhi had survived, and cast his immeasurable influence on the Constitution of India? The answers to some of these questions may lie in the unique events that transpired in a corner of Maharashtra in 1938. In the summer of that year, a procession of 6,000 peasants living in the town of Atpadi, in present-day Maharashtra, began marching the 160km to Aundh, the capital of their microscopic princely state. Intelligence officers working for the ruler of Aundh, Raja Bhawanrao Pant Pratinidhi, sent alarming reports of an angry crowd, led by fiery  leaders, shouting revolutionary slogans.  These spies were entirely right to be alarmed. The procession accounted for more than 10% of the entire population of Atpadi  taluka . Two days later, and with no sign of enthusiasm abating, the procession was camped just 5km outside the gates of Aundh. Writing about the events some five decades later, the late Apa Sahib Pant, son and heir of ...

Durian. Depending on whom you talk to it’s either the most beloved or the most despised fruit on the planet. It suffers no moderation, no wishy-washiness. It is the king of fruits or the worst thing you’ve ever tasted. Due to its potent odour – delicate and sweet to its advocates and sewage-like to its detractors – durian has been banned from airplanes, subways, and hotels (though punishments appear light if non-existent). But a  recent study  in  Ecology and Evolution  finds there may be no durians at all without bats: big, threatened bats.  The scientists found that flying foxes – bats in the  Pteropus  and  Acerodon  genus and the largest in the world – are likely vital pollinators for the polarising durian. “We already knew that flying foxes feed on durian flowers, but there was this unsubstantiated belief, even among some researchers, that flying foxes just destroyed the flowers,” said Sheema Abdul Aziz, the lead researcher on the p...

India ranked among the bottom five nations in the global Environmental Performance Index (EPI)  list  released in January 2018, slipping 36 places in two years. Multiple studies conducted recently have shown that India is dealing with an environmental crisis.  Consider the following findings: None of the 280 Indian cities surveyed in a recent Greenpeace  study  met the World Health Organization (WHO) standards for clean air, with capital city Delhi ranking worst, as  IndiaSpend   reported  on February 5, 2018; Yamuna, which runs through Delhi, has  16 million faecal coliform  parts per million (PPM). The standard is 500 PPM for potable water; Bengaluru’s lakes often  catch fire  because of the waste and untreated sewage dumped in them. The government does not appear to be worried about India’s poor showing in environment protection. The minister for environment, forests & ...

The Saudi royals, with their billions upon billions of dollars invested around the world, their palaces in Europe and North Africa, their yachts and just about any exotic item that money can buy, may pray five times a day, but their real worship is filthy lucre. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have  pledged to provide over $1 billion  to address the humanitarian crisis in Yemen that they have created through a brutal bombing campaign, a ground war turning Yemenis against Yemenis and an illegal blockade of aid entering areas controlled by the Huthis. The best way to characterize this hypocritical largesse is in the colorful 17th century King James Version biblical prose: it is nothing but “filthy lucre.” The British Prime Minister Theresa May, presiding over a Britain not as great as it once claimed to be, is  pushing for a UN resolution  to praise this cynical ploy to cover up crimes against humanity. No doubt this move by an unpopular politician ab...

NB : To America's schoolchildren: I'm old enough to be your grandfather; and am not an American. I speak only as someone who cares about the wave of violence that is engulfing the world. I belong to the '68 generation - we fought injustice, and we remain proud of it. It's 50 years since 1968. Today all I can say is - stand up and tell your elders that if they allow the situation to go back to 'normal' after this latest massacre of innocents, they are destroying not only the lives of the younger generation of Americans, they are also saying goodbye to their consciences. Children please understand - the NRA and their associate political careerists are stoned on platitudes like 'our thoughts and prayers are with you'. They are beyond reason and logic . Political ideologies are a means of destroying the conscience. A part of your elder generation has lost the capacity to empathise with human suffering or speak reasonably on social issues.  The machismo b...

I’m no good with financials. When people talk about futures and hedging and shorting, I think of retirement, shrubbery, and electrical fires. When they talk about interest rates and capital gains, I think about guitar practice and metro lines. But I have come to realise that there’s a lot of money to be made in India if you’re good with financials—and by good, I mean so bad that it’s criminal.I only dimly understand the Nirav Modi- Punjab National Bank  scam  because of the helpful ‘explainers’ put out by  Reuters  and  The Wire  and scroll.in etc. Some badly brought up  PNB  bank officials colluded with the equally badly brought up  Nirav Modi  and his family and their companies, to issue loans based on  Letters of Understanding  of which they kept no record, and against which they saw no need for any collateral. This allowed Modi and gang to borrow what we first thought totalled Rs 110 billion (Rs 11,000 crore) of public...

There are innumerable versions of the birth of the modern era. Historians do not even agree about the date of this event. Some make modernity begin in the 15th and 16th centuries, with the so-called Renaissance (a concept invented in the 19th century by Jules Michelet, as the French historian Lucien Lefevre has shown). Others see the real rupture, modernity’s launching point, in the 18th century, when the philosophy of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and the beginnings of industrialization shook the planet. But whatever date historians and modern philosophers prefer for the beginning of their own world, they agree on one point: its positive conquests are almost always taken as its original impulses. Download a PDF :  The destructive origins of capitalism FORUM: The Military in World History The artistic and scientific innovations of the Italian Renaissance are considered to be just as important for the rise of modernity as Columbus’s great voyages of discovery, th...