Dilip Simeon's blog

Kolkata : On February 14, Chandni Rajbanshi – three years old – was playing catch with her cousin Swapna. They raced through the Teena Brick Works in Pundaooh, in the Hooghly district of West Bengal, where their father Uday Rajbanshiwas a labourer. It was Sunday morning and most of the kiln-workers were resting. Ten-year-old Swapna had caught up with Chandni, and lifted her in her arms, when she stepped on a plastic sheet – the lid of a furnace, which split and dropped both girls into the flames. It required a backhoe excavator to lift out their remains four hours later. All that could be found was a hip-bone. The accident might even have gone unnoticed except for another child playing nearby who saw the two girls fall. “Had the child not witnessed that, everything would have been brushed off by lodging a missing complaint at the police station,” Uday Rajbanshi, Chandni’s father, told  The Wire . “We would have lived in hope that the girls were onl...

Demonstrators marched in Vietnam's capital on Monday to mark the 28th anniversary of a bloody naval battle with China and to denounce Beijing's growing assertiveness in the hotly contested waters of the South China Sea. About 150 people wearing headbands and carrying large banners circled the busy streets around Hanoi's Hoan Kiem lake chanting "down with invasive China". They laid wreaths for 64 Vietnamese sailors who died in a 1988 clash with Chinese forces in the Spratly islands. The protest was small, but significant given Vietnam's history of preventing or breaking up demonstrations. While anti-China sentiment is strong among the public, it is a sensitive issue for the ruling Communist Party. Police made no attempt to stop the 90-minute protest, which was larger than those last year, including one on the eve of Chinese President Xi Jinping's visit to Hanoi in November. The rally comes amid tension, brinkmanship and a torrent of megaphone dip...

Reading Mariani only confirms that Stevens was a magician, or perhaps a god: Out of what seemed like nothing, he created a universe. The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens By Paul Mariani Reviewed by ADAM KIRSCH How to live a life “unsponsored” by a deity, in which we are responsible for inventing our own meanings, was the great subject of Stevens’s poetry from beginning to end. His answer, as developed in the long, ruminative poems he wrote from the 1930s onward—in volumes like Ideas of Order (1936) and The Auroras of Autumn (1950)—was the same one Matthew Arnold had proposed in the Victorian age: The role that was once played by religion must now be filled by poetry, or more broadly by the imagination. For the modernist poets who revolutionized American literature in the early 20th century, impersonality was a kind of mania—and a sign of how seriously they took their artistic project. The 1910s and ’20s were the palmy days of Green...

ORAN, Algeria — AFTER Tahrir came Cologne. After the square came sex. The Arab revolutions of 2011 aroused enthusiasm at first, but passions have since waned. Those movements have come to look imperfect, even ugly: For one thing, they have failed to touch ideas, culture, religion or social norms, especially the norms relating to sex. Revolution doesn’t mean modernity. The attacks on Western women by Arab migrants in Cologne, Germany, on New Year’s Eve evoked the harassment of women in Tahrir Square itself during the heady days of the Egyptian revolution. The reminder has led people in the West to realize that one of the great miseries plaguing much of the so-called Arab world, and the Muslim world more generally, is its sick relationship with women. In some places, women are veiled, stoned and killed; at a minimum, they are blamed for sowing disorder in the ideal society. In response, some European countries have taken to producing guides of good conduct to refugees and migrants. ...

This video , excerpted from a speech given by a former stone-pelter, Irfan Gull, acquires greater significance today in light of sudden rise in militant activities in Kashmir and after the events at Jawaharlal Nehru University, where apparently a few young Kashmiris, with their faces covered, shouted provocative slogans against India and then vanished. This video is not only an exposé of how Kashmir’s youth are manipulated but also an honestly told story, a realisation based on experience, an expression of moderation, a confession, and, above all, an appeal to all sections of people – for introspection, dialogue and resolution of the Kashmir problem through understanding and non-violent discourse. The historic importance of this video may be seen in light of many Kashmiri people’s experiences in Kashmir, where free expression of one’s political disagreement with the dominant discourse is fraught with grave risks to life. Irfan Gull, a young Kashmiri student, has taken a great risk...

Pope Francis  washed and kissed the feet  of 12 refugees Thursday at a migrant center in Castelnuovo di Porto outside of Rome, Italy. The ceremony took place as part of the observances of  Maundy Thursday , the Holy Thursday before Easter that dates back to the story of Jesus’ Last Supper. In a powerful gesture of interfaith embrace, the pontiff knelt down before a group of eight men and four women, among whom were Muslims, Coptic Christians and one Hindu. “All of us together: Muslims, Hindus, Catholics, Copts, Evangelicals ... all brothers and children of the same God,” the pontiff  said  during a Mass before the foot washing ceremony. “We want to live together in peace.”  In previous years, Francis has observed Maundy Thursday by washing the feet of prisoners , the elderly and  people with disabilities . Shortly after his election as pope in 2013, the pontiff made waves by  including women  in his foot washing cere...

It lasted only 20 minutes and took place 1.2 billion light years away, but NASA managed to catch it on camera: a star exploding. The brilliant flash of an exploding star's shockwave -- or "shock breakout" -- has been captured for the first time in visible light by the Kepler space telescope.  An international team of researchers analyzed some 50 trillion stars photographed by Kepler over a three-year period, searching for supernovae. A supernova occurs at the end of a massive star's life, as a colossal, catastrophic explosion erupts, causing the star to burn brighter than some galaxies for around two weeks before fading to black. The team analyzing the Kepler data found exactly what they were looking for: a red supergiant 500 times the size of our sun and around 1.2 billion light years away exploded while in the telescope's view. Lead researcher Peter Garnavich, an astrophysics professor at the University of Notre Dame,  said in a statement  that the star...