Taslima Nasreen on rape and punishment to rapists

"Everywhere the woman is merely a body. Her brains are not important. 

Rape has been a weapon of war. Armies do it. Communities and castes inflict rapes on women as a strategy to dominate.

Capital punishment is a rather easy, hassle-free solution for the government. It's a lot more difficult to make men cease to see women as sex objects."

Who is a public intellectual?

"The intellectual’s job is to think past the culture: to question the myths, metaphors, and assumptions that limit our collective imagination. The founder of the breed was Socrates. As Kazin also said, an intellectual is someone for whom ideas are “instruments of salvation.” 

Gary Gutting on Derrida

I agree that you should take Derrida seriously, but I’d advise thinking carefully before committing large amounts of time to reading him. He’s especially frustrating if you try to pay him the complement of a rigourous close reading.
In 3: AM MAGAZINE, Gary Gutting is interviewed by Richard Marshall.

Amitav Ghosh on Aung San Suu Kyi

 Let me say that for me she’s been a sort of beacon in the world. I feel that admiration for her, and I’m feeling incredibly happy she reached this point in time when she’s able to initiate changes in Burma.

What is level playing field?

What our economists like to call a level playing field is actually a machine spinning with a centrifugal force that funnels the poor out like disposable residue, and concentrates wealth in fewer and fewer hands, which is why 100 people have wealth equivalent to 25 per cent of the GDP and hundreds of millions live on less than `20 a day. It is why most of our children suffer from severe malnutrition, why two lakh farmers have killed themselves and why India is home to a majority of the world’s poor.

Jeanette Winterson on value of life

 I am interested in the real value of my life. My net worth is not what I own; it is what I am.

There is such a thing as society and we need it. We need community, friendship, civility, neighbourliness. Those things are easily destroyed, and destroyed most easily when the dominant ideology is as follows: turn all of the planet and all of its people into one vast moneymaking machine.

Oh my God

Oh my God is a hard-hitting satirical film that slams the organised religion in a compelling way. Today I saw it on my laptop, and liked a lot.

My profuse thanks to Umesh Shukla, director and writer of the film. His was really a brilliant concept, and  he had, like a master film-maker, turned it into a serious, and at the same time an entertaining movie.

I wonder how he had the censor board pass the film. The film would sure offend a lot of people and raise their hackles with its direct and scathing attack, of course justified, on religion.  

The Bollywood, it seems, has now some thinking guys as directors and writers.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti turns down the 50,000 euro Hungarian PEN Prize

Since the Prize is partially funded by the present Hungarian government, and since the policies of this right-wing regime tend toward authoritarian rule and the consequent curtailing of freedom of expression and civil liberties, I find it impossible for me to accept the Prize in the United States. Thus I must refuse the Prize in its present terms.

Did Salman Rushdie know it?

My own unscientific theory is that he knew his satanic novel would create a controversy, maybe even the odd riot, but that it wouldn’t be bad for sales. What he did not anticipate is the scale of the outrage on what Muslims saw as an assault on their identity at a time when their faith was being demonised. That is where he fell short—and has had to pay a terrible price for the error.

Noam Chomsky on US election

Elections are run by the public relations industry. Its primary task is commercial advertising, which is designed to undermine markets by creating uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices – the exact opposite of how markets are supposed to work, but certainly familiar to anyone who has watched television.

Salman Rushdie on leaders exploiting religion

"...it’s not about religion, it’s about power. We need to expose the ruthlessness and the unscrupulousness of these leaders who are doing this for completely corrupt and venal reasons. Exploiting religion in order to create a political atmosphere that they think will benefit them"

Kudos to Mamata Banerjee

Kudos to Mamata Banerjee for her historic stand against the FDI and other reform push policy of UPA-2. She has walked out of the UPA, and her ministers will resign on Friday.

It seems somewhat surprising and unexpected specially in view of her not-so-good track record of ruling West Bengal for over a year.

You could only expect this move from the Left who claimed - do they claim now - themselves as the champion of the poor and the down trodden. But Mamata has done it, and how well-timed it is!

 Of course, it entails great risk for her personal career as well as the future of her party Trinamul Congress, but it is going to get her a great mileage in terms of her image as a people's leader.

Who, among our politicians, are concerned about the plight of the common man? It's not certainly the triumvirate who rules India now.

So, is Mamata the new messiah?

Unlikely. She lacks the mindset and capability of one.

There is probably a cool and intelligent brain, perhaps of another human being, behind her decision.

Yet she deserves our kudos. Doesn't she?

Teesta Setalvad on Naroda Patiya verdict

One knows there are good people everywhere who are really appreciating what you are doing, but very few want to take on the system themselves and get into trouble. But you can only take on a system when you engage with it, and when you engage with the system, you risk yourself the most. The system works to tire you out; not give you justice. If you have grit and are lucky, you survive. If you are not lucky, you won’t.

Facebook, Twitter misusing their power

 I’d support any measure, including censorship, to stop platforms like Facebook and Twitter from being used to spread terror

Pankaj Mishra on Buddha

"He struck me as a very profound thinker, perhaps the greatest the subcontinent has produced, someone who stood well out of the mainstream of classical Indian thought, and was also astonishingly modern in his diagnosis of the human condition. He was particularly trenchant about the concept of the self-directed, self-seeking autonomous individual — something that in our own era has been the basis of social and political and economic models that we associate with Western modernity and which have now been exported across the world."

Chetan Bhagat, the great 'unthinker'!

Bhagat is not a thinker. He is our great ‘unthinker’, as sure a representative of heedless ‘new India’ as the khadi-clad politician is of old India

Idea of Power!

" I put an individual in a seat of honour. But he has no idea of his powers. He is acting as if he is the PM or the President. Those working in various commissions are misusing funds to buy vehicles and property."
- Mamata Banerjee as in a report published in the Hindustan Times dated August 15, 2012.

You -like -me - and I-like-you culture

Twitter and Tumblr form the superstructure of today’s literary world.

Kiran Nagarkar on Mumbai

Mumbai has deteriorated beyond repair. We are not in a desperate state - we are much worse than that. The housing situation is insane. I don't think i can afford a hut in Mumbai today. There is no notion of infrastructure, resulting in monu- mental disaster.

Real estate developers build higher and higher sky-scrapers which come with readymade slums, for who will do the washing and cleaning for the rich? The city is divided between people who have water and those who don't. This was one of India's leading cities. Now, we are not at the bottom of the pile but well below the bottom.

When the British ruled us, their laws made sense. They were here to exploit us. They built chawls for mill workers where 40 families shared four bathrooms. But people continued to live this way well after Independence...today, chawls may be a dying institution but the living conditions of the poor haven't changed much - this is precisely why chawls are so important while writing the Bombay novel.

Scavenging in rubbish baskets for food in Greece!

"There’s irony in the fact that in the midst of the most affluent civilization history has witnessed people are scavenging in rubbish baskets for food. That’s the kind of contradiction I think Marx was talking about. I also stressed how much Marx admired the way that capitalism had in a very short space of time accumulated such wealth—material, spiritual, cultural—but that it couldn’t do that without the contradiction of generating inequality at the same time; we’re seeing a stark instance of that in Greece today. So that’s the kind of thing I’d point to to show the relevance of Marx. Even within the anti-capitalist movement, Marx is not a majority presence. One has to say that. It’s partly because of the discrediting of Marxism by Stalinism, which will take a long time for the Marxist left to recover from. But I’m not myself madly concerned about whether people stick the label “Marxist” onto themselves as long as they take a critical stance towards the present situation. It doesn’t matter what they call themselves."

Ashis Nandy on Mamata Banerjee's diktat

"I would advise Ms Banerjee to seek the help of psychiatrists in Calcutta. I would diagnose her as suffering from incipient paranoia. She sees enemies and controversies against her everywhere...She is taking upon herself the responsibility of interpreting the constitution of India when there are far better people than her to do so... All sorts of people manage to come into power these days, from nuts to psychopaths to paranoids... and I am afraid West Bengal has been saddled with a chief minister who seems to be suffering from paranoia...Mamata Banerjee should be advised to dismiss all the editors of all the newspapers and become the editor herself. She should even draw the cartoons herself. Then she would not have any reason to grumble.... We are stuck with a nut."

Montek's great assessment of Indian poverty!

We have long since appreciated the talent of.Montek Singh Ahluwalia, the deputy chairman of Planning Commission. But what he has put forward this time about poverty has left us enthralled. Why don't the Nobel Committee consider him as the next candidate for the Nobel in Economics?

Jug Suraiya has an interesting take on Montek's new definition of Indian poverty, but being a wise and clever guy, he does not even for once mention his name.

Arundhoti Roy on capitalism

For some time now, I was missing Arundhoti Roy: no new writing from her in a long time. What was she doing,  I wondered. Now she comes up with a brilliant essay on CAPITALISM in the Outlook Magazine. Read it in print if you want to savour it in full.

By calling their tower Antilla, do the Ambanis hope to sever their links to the poverty and squalor of their homeland and raise a new civilisation? Is this the final act of the most successful secessionist movement in India? The secession of the middle and upper classes into outer space? 

Can Taslima return to Kolkata?

Taslima Nasreen, the controversial Bengali author, has always wanted to come back to Kolkata. The Left Front government then headed by Budhadev Bhttacharya threw her out  way back in 2008. With the change in regime, she became more hopeful. But as things stand, her chance of returning to live in the city gets slimmer each day. In today's interview with the Hindustan times, (sorry no link available), she says:

"But now I see that Didi, too, does not want me in Kolkata. Many pro-Mamata intellectuals had assured me once that I could be back in Kolkata once she came to power.The silence of those who had earlier led a number of 'Bring back Taslima' campaigns during the Left Front regime has been all the more astonishing and enriching! I don't yet think that they have started disliking me but I don't understand why they did not raise their voices this time."

What makes Mikhail Shishkin that he is?

Bunin taught me not to compromise, and to go on believing in myself. Chekhov passed on his sense of humanity – that there can’t be any wholly negative characters in your text. And from Tolstoy I learned not to be afraid of being naïve.