Svetlana Alexievich on Russian media

Of course, Russian television perverts people. Journalists of Russian media should be tried for what they are saying. For what they are saying about Europe, Donbas and the Ukrainians. It's not just that people want to hear it. We can say today about a collective Putin that lives inside every Russian.We have faced the situation when the Red Empire disappeared, but people were left.

International writers' call for justice for murdered bloggers

We were shocked and horrified by last week’s murder of 32-year-old blogger and editor Ananta Bijoy Das, who was hacked to death on his way to work by a masked gang wielding machetes in the city of Sylhet on 12 May. Prior to his death, Ananta Bijoy Das had reportedly received a number of death threats from Islamist militants, and his name had appeared in two assassination lists published in the Bangladeshi media, alongside those of other secular bloggers described as anti-Islamic and blasphemous.'

Read on...

Social media "a tool of silencing"!

“The fear of causing offence, the fear of ruffling the careful layers of comfort, becomes a fetish.  As such, the goal of many public conversations in the United States “is not truth … [it] is comfort”.
-Chimamanda Adichie  at 2015 PEN World Voices Festival

Haruki Murakami on Terrorism

The biggest issue right now is that borders are disappearing. We have this thing called terrorism, like an integrated organism spreading across borders. This problem cannot be solved with Western European logic or strategy. They say they are destroying “terrorist nations” but by suppressing them with force, they merely make the terrorists disperse. I lived in the United States during the Iraq War, and was particularly stunned by the superficiality of the media’s reporting of it. Or perhaps I should say, the dangers of “American justice.” In the long run, what’s happening in the Western world now is the meltdown, diffusion and extinction of that logic. This process started from around the time the Berlin Wall fell.

Salman goes to jail!

Amused and a little surprised by Salman Khan being sentenced to jail for five years in the hit-and-run case. It seems like something hard to believe. But things like this happen, I know, Judgement from the court, I mean.

I found it hugely interesting when I read in the newspaper about a person claiming that he, not Salman, was at the driver's shit on that night, and whatever shit happened that night, he owed responsibility for that. It was of course the last desperate attempt to save Salman, the hunk hero, behind whom the entire Bollywood and a part of the powers-that-be stood by with their clout and resources. Sometime  before the last LokSabha election, Salman, as far as I remember, joined the BJP bandwagon to actively help Narendra Modi  in his victory. But this also doesn't work.

 It's interesting again that none is celebrating over the judgement, not even the victims (they would like more compensation instead). Rather there is a gloom in the media and elsewhere, which goes to validate my pet theory that things around us are going shit everyday.

But I liked the moment when Justice Deshpande announced: it's you who was driving that night. It was the moment of reckoning, and who would challenge the truth? There must have been a stunned silence at the courtroom at that moment.

Thank you, Justice Deshpande, for your intrepid verdict. You'r my world. I adore you.