Dilip Simeon's blog

"Eat a good breakfast. Take a rucksack with a gas mask and swimming goggles. Write your name on your arm. Write your details into a message on your mobile. And go to the Square." The tweet appeared after three of the (at least) 38 people killed in the streets of  Egypt  over the last three days proved impossible to identify. It was picked up by the well-respected Egyptian daily al-Shorouk and published to #Tahrirsupplies – the hashtag that collates what you can bring in to the square if you want to help. Egypt is much more than Tahrir Square. People across the country are demanding the abdication of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (Scaf). On Tuesday night as the news cameras concentrated on Tahrir, the army and police were attacking citizens in other places: Alexandria, Assiut, Aswan, Damietta, Ismailia, Luxor, Mahalla, Mansoura, Sohag and Suez. And yet, of course, in this age of spectacle it was the images of Tahrir that were most shocking. We could hardly believe ...

THIS IS A SPECIAL APPEAL TO JOIN US IN PETITTIONING THE GOVERNOR OF CHHATTISGARH FOR THE RELEASE OF OUR YOUNG TRADE UNION LEADER AND ELECTED JANPAD MEMBER - BHAGWATI SAHU - INCARCERATED IN BALODA BAZAR SUB JAIL SINCE 18TH MAY 2011 IN A PATENTLY FALSE AND FABRICATED CASE FOISTED BY THE AMBUJA-HOLCIM MANAGEMENT. Com Bhagwati Sahu led the militant agitation of hundreds of contract workers in the Ambuja- Holcim plant at Village Rawaan, Tehsil Baloda Bazar, district Raipur and it was only after the struggle of the CMM Union - Pragatisheel Cement Shramik Sangh that these contract workers started getting even minimum wages and their proper PF dues (earlier the company would deduct its own share also from the workers wage and not even deposit it regularly!!) He also led the struggles of peasants in the area against the company’s encroachments on village commons, inadequate compensation, the gross violation of the state’s Re...

"...Neha Pandita, 16, who lives in Mishriwala Camp, says that her parents burst into tears everytime they remember their lives in Kashmir. "Sometimes I enjoy these things, but only in dreams and not in reality. I want to see all these in reality." Even today, the years of living under constant stress has left women like Gunwati ravaged. While Gunwati longs for the land of her youth, for young Neha, they do not even form the stuff of memories. She has spent most of her growing years in a camp in Jammu, only hearing about the homeland from the older generation. Both the women are Kashmiri Pandits, who were forced out of their homes in the Kashmir Valley because of the violence during the years of militancy beginning in the early 1990s. The impact of the conflict on these women and on thousands of people is directly related to the daily environment in which grenade explosions, improvised explosive device blasts, killings and encounters were more common than perhaps a routi...

Hardnews' Amit Sengupta on the implications of Ishrat's murder: "... Modi's ambitions have been repeatedly thwarted by the facts of the legacy he has left behind in polarised Gujarat, where cases of massacres keep arriving like a dark shadow of blood-soaked truth , even while the screams and torture of victims have not really been completely eliminated from the political unconscious. From Naroda Patiya and Gulberg Society to Panchmahal, Sardarpura, Dahod and Best Bakery in Vadodra; from Bilquis Bano to Zaheera Sheikh and Zakia Jaffrey, it's like a grotesque serial of organised, evidenced injustice, scripted by a state-sponsored massacre, which comes back, which will keep returning, to haunt Modi, his former mentor,  LK Advani , the RSS and BJP for all times to come. The organised BJP-VHP-Bajrang Dal gangs, led by the likes of Jaideep Patel, Babu Bajrangi, Mayaben Kodnani, among others, with ministers actually calling the shots from police control rooms, as ...

The most famous Einstein pronouncement on God came in the form of a telegram, in which he was asked to answer the question in 50 words or less. He did it in 32: “ I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind. ” (These quotes are documented in Walter Isaacson’s excellent 2007 biography  Einstein: His Life and Universe . ) In a 1997 issue of  Skeptic  magazine ( Vol 5, No. 2 ), one of my contributing editors, Michael Gilmore, published an article on Einstein’s God based on a series of letters that he obtained from a World War II U.S. Navy veteran named Guy H. Raner, who corresponded with Einstein on the God question. We republished those letters in their entirety for the first time anywhere. In the first letter, dated June 14, 1945, sent from the  USS Bougainville  in the Pacific Ocean, Raner recounts a conversation he had on the ship with a ...

(And Ferguson demands anapology)  '... The banner of white supremacism has been more warily raised ever since in post-imperial Europe, and very rarely by mainstream politicians and writers. In the United States, racial anxieties have been couched either in such pseudo-scientific tracts about the inferiority of certain races as  The Bell Curve , or in big alarmist theories like Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisations’. It’s not at all surprising that in his last book Huntington fretted about the destruction by Latino immigration of America’s national identity, which is apparently a construct of ‘Anglo-Protestant culture’. As power ostensibly shifts to the East, a counterpoise to dismay over the West’s loss of authority and influence is sought in a periodic ballyhooing of the ‘trans-Atlantic alliance’, as in Philip Bobbitt’s  Terror and Consent  (2008), which Niall Ferguson in an enthusiastic review claimed will ‘be read with pleasure by men of a certain age, class...

Last September, scientists involved in the international Opera experiment said that a beam of neutrinos had arrived 60 billionths of a second faster than light would have travelled from the underground particle physics laboratory at Cern in Geneva to the Gran Sasso facility in Italy, 466 miles away. Over the weekend, the Opera scientists said they had repeated the experiment with minor modifications to the length of the particle beam to take into account a possible source of error. They said they found the same result – neutrinos that could travel faster than light. Under Einstein's theory of relativity, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Otherwise, it would be possible to travel through time. Now a second group of scientists, part of the Icarus collaboration, has re-analysed the same beam and concluded that the particles could not have travelled faster than light speed without exhibiting a fall in energy levels, which was not detected. The re-analysis of th...