Dilip Simeon's blog

Our excrement is a natural, renewable and sustainable resource – if only we can overcome our visceral disgust of it… Grandpa had a system of sludge distribution. He never filled the buckets fully so that, when he carried them, the sloshing goop wouldn’t spill over onto his boots. Sometimes he carried the buckets by hand, sometimes he balanced them on a  koromyslo  – an arched wooden pole placed over the shoulders to distribute weight evenly. He poked small holes in the tomato patches where the dried-up plants carried no fruit that sewage could contaminate – and poured the goo into them, covering the holes with soil. He splashed some around the roots of the apple and cherry trees and raked some leaves over so that, when we walked around, we wouldn’t get any on the soles of our feet. And he also dumped a bunch into one of the compost pits, adding it to the heap of other organic refuse. The compost pits were where Mother Nature forged its black gold. And there was a system to...

A brilliant study of corruption by power, more specifically of the willingness of the German elites to chummy up to the psychotic vileness of the Third Reich. This is an account of clubs, diplomatic receptions and parties, but one shot through with a scholarly analysis of the nature of sociability, elitism and luxury in a racist totalitarian state. A most impressive work: Historical Association High Society in the Third Reich  by  Fabrice d’Almeida Reviewed by Christopher Clark In a diary entry for 11 August 1936, the German writer and journalist Friedrich Percyval Reck-Malleczewen recalled his first meeting with Adolf Hitler. It was in 1920, at the Munich home of his friend, the composer and conductor Clemens von Franckenstein. Among the Gobelin tapestries and the marble panels (Franckenstein lived at the time in the Villa Lenbach) sat Hitler in a pair of gaiters and a floppy wide-brimmed hat, clutching a leather riding whip. He appeared – to Reck at least – uneasy in this...

The years leading up to the declaration of war between the Axis and Allied powers in 1939 were tumultuous times for people across the globe. The Great Depression had started a decade before, leaving much of the world unemployed and desperate. Nationalism was sweeping through Germany, and it chafed against the punitive measures of the Versailles Treaty that had ended World War I. China and the Empire of Japan had been at war since Japanese troops invaded Manchuria in 1931. Germany, Italy, and Japan were testing the newly founded League of Nations with multiple invasions and occupations of nearby countries, and felt emboldened when they encountered no meaningful consequences. German-made Stuka dive bombers in flight above Spain on May 30, 1939, during the Spanish Civil War. AP Photo The Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, becoming a rehearsal of sorts for the upcoming World War -- Germany and Italy supported the nationalist rebels led by General Francisco Franco, and some 40,000 foreign...

Just as every grief narrative is a reckoning with loss, every love story is a chronicle of finding,” writes Kathryn Schulz in her eloquent and tender memoir,  Lost & Found . “And so, much as my father’s death made me wonder about the relationship between large losses and smaller ones, falling for someone made me think about what finding love has in common with the broader act of finding anything at all.” This is the deceptively simple premise of this slim book: losing and finding are such seemingly unremarkable elements of everyday life that we rarely pause to think about their significance, until, of course, it comes to losing and finding people, experiences that are among the most profound of our lives and that go to the heart of what it means to be human. Living through these life-changing moments in quick succession – she met her partner shortly before her father died – means Schulz is ideally placed to consider, through the prism of her own experience, the various ways p...

Letter to the Readers, Mainstream, April 23, 2022 Climate Change 2022 Report: Act Now to Avert Catastrophic Events  | K N Ninan Earth Day re-emphasizes need for resolving the survival crisis  | Bharat Dogra Making Sense of IMF’s Institutional View on Capital Flows  | Kavaljit Singh Jammu and Kashmir: Tenth Report Of The Concerned Citizens’ Group Alas, Hindi Will Never Unite India  | TJS George Three cheers to Comrade Brinda Karat!  | Faraz Ahmad The Silent Revolution of Subaltern leader  | Gajanur, Kumar & Tembhurne Why is BJP’s popularity declining in Bengal  | Tarun Kumar Basu Will the Nagas get a peace deal?  | Sandeep Pandey and Pankaj Pushkar Audit of UIDAI reveals what Delhi High Court is yet to reveal  | Gopal Krishna On 103rd Commemoration of Jallianwala Bagh Massacre  | Shamsul Islam Elephants face an elephantine problem  | M.R. Narayan Swamy Puniyani...

There are already signs that the coup has prompted an increase in illegal mining and logging, and regime economic policies are set to compound the environmental destruction at a time when activists and communities are unable to push back. Within months of the February 2021 coup, there were already signs that military rule could have disastrous consequences for Myanmar’s natural environment.  From far northern Kachin State,  reports  began to emerge that illegal rare earth mining in remote territory controlled by a military-affiliated Border Guard Force had begun to ramp up. The region is one of the world’s  major sources  of several types of heavy rare earths, which are exported over the border to China for use in everything from electric vehicles to smartphones. But the mining process is environmentally damaging; it involves toxic chemicals that are pumped through the mountains and often seep into waterways. As one miner  told   Frontier  last ...

Everyone grows up with (or into) individual traits such as gender and intelligence, but also different group identities – you can be a Hindu or a Muslim, a Dalit or a Kayasth, a Bengali or a Malayali, and so on. How should the Indian state see the individual – as primarily defined by their individuality or by a group identity? The choice matters for it determines what we hold the state responsible for. It also affects how we see each other in society. Our early leaders chose to focus on the individual. “I am glad,” Dr Ambedkar said, “that the Draft Constitution has discarded the village and adopted the individual as its unit.” However, the Constitution and subsequent policies also recognised the importance of traditional groups such as those formed around religion, language, or caste… https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/toi-edit-page/the-missing-i-in-india-groups-not-individuals-are-the-focus-of-most-policy-politics-this-has-social-economic-costs/ Naxalites should lay down thei...