Centenary of the Hindustan Ghadar Party on October 5, 2013On March 6, 2013, I gave a talk at the Desh Bhagat Hall (Memorial Hall of Patriots) in Jalandhar on my Punjab partition book. When Professor Parminder Singh and I arrived a meeting was going on. Some senior comrades and visiting Indian trade unionists from the UK were discussing activities later in the year to […]
A Lahoria in Delhi on September 7, 2013When Indians and Pakistanis visit each other, questions of identity, patriotism, and self-esteem almost invariably crop up in even the most enlightened circles. That for more than a thousand years Indian-Muslims were a hyphenated community among many others such as caste Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, Dalits, and all of them together were described generically even as […]
Arundhati Roy and comrades: the Indian Maoist movement on August 31, 2013On February 27, 2013 documentary filmmaker Ajay Bhardwaj and I went to see the celebrated writer Arundhati Roy. Sanjay Kak, Arjun Raina and a couple of other revolutionary leftists had also been invited for dinner. It was a memorable evening indeed. I listened to their critique of the gross injustice meted out to the wretched […]
Correct English: wall chalking or graffiti? on June 1, 2013It would not be an exaggeration to say that the knowledge of the English language is the passport to the modern world. I was really pleased to read Shakil Chaudhary’s Handbook of Functional English, an exceptionally well-crafted and skillfully structured contribution on the subject. No run-of-the-mill English-teaching guide, it has a great deal of thought-provoking […]