Ram Puniyani From the decade of 1980 the identity based politics has come to the fore in our Country. The Shah Bano issue, the Ram Temple imbroglio and the Rath yatras, brought to fore the issues related identity, the first major casualty of this politics was the demolition of Babri Masjid. Around that the notion…

Ram Puniyani It is already over two months that Narendra Modi has taken over as the prime minister of the country. While some may call it as a ‘honey moon period’ others will say that its actions during last few months are an indication enough of shape of things to come. It goes without saying…

Ram Puniyani The phenomenon of God is probably the most complex one in the World. For believers there is a range of belief system about the supernatural powers. For agnostics it is ‘I don’t know’ and for atheists there is no supernatural power. The systems of thought relevant to the topic range from Animists (nature…

Ram Puniyani In the aftermath of the recent elections Congress, Communist parties, Samajvadi and Lalu’s RJD, which can be called secular in some sense; bit the dust.  In the review of defeat the major opposition party Congress, which has been in power for maximum number of years, one major opinion from its top leader A.K. Antony…

Ram Puniyani India Pakistan relations have always been mired with in various controversies, which have been preventing the friendly relations with our neighbor, who in ‘popular perception’ is seen as anenemy. It is due to this that while all the members of SAARC countries have been invited, the one to draw maximum popular attention has…

Ram Puniyani The results of Parliamentary Elections are very interesting. With 31% vote share BJP-Modi won 282 Parliament seats, Congress with 19% vote share got 44 seats, BSP polled 4.1 percent of votes and drew a total blank, the Trinamool Congress won 3.8 percent of vote share with 34 seats, Samajwadi Party won 3.4 percent…

Ram Puniyani Politics is a strange game where no holds are barred for electoral advantages. It also expresses, to some extent, the political ideology of those playing these games in addition to the distortion of events, which are done deliberately. Interpretation of the very same events is diametrically different for different political groups. The sad…

Ramkrishna Bhattacharya In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts Marx emphasized the fact that humans become truly human only when they can rise above consumption and set themselves to other kinds of activity excepting those meant to supply their daily needs, the means of subsistence. One of their objections against the capitalist society, nay of class…

  Ramkrishna Bhattacharya Sebastiano Timpanaro believed that ‘the agreement between materialism and Leopardian pessimism had its basis in hedonism; and hedonism is the basis of all scientific systems of ethics’ (On Materialism p.66). I have already critiqued Timpanaro’s concept of ‘materialist pessimism’ (Psyche and Society 11: 2 December 2013, 7-15). Let us now turn to…

G. Ramakrishna While laying the foundation-stone for a planetarium in Bangalore recentlyi the President of India explained how the Vedic lore is replete with astronomical knowledge. He almost felt that the Vedic people seemed to know more astronomy than we do. Shortly after the president’s revelation about Vedic astronomy came Maj. Ahluwalia’s analysis about the…

G Ramakrishna Karl Marx pointed out that truly human liberation is to be achieved only by breaking every kind of bondage that mankind has been subjected to in the course of the evolution of society through different social formations. Emancipation has its philosophers even as oppression has its agents and defenders. Marx as the most…

Ram Puniyani Arun Shourie, who was part of NDA, a fellow traveler and an ideologue of BJP wrote several books, many of them against minorities and dalits in particular. One of these which was strongly protested against by large sections of people, dalits in particular, was his “Worshipping False Gods”. In this book he expressed…

Ram Puniyani Banning or attacking the books in current times has been aplenty. There have been many reasons given for this intolerant attitude by different social-political groups. The cases of Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie, Taslima Nasreen’s Lajja, book on Sonia Gandhi Red Saree, A.K. Ramanujan’s Three Hundred Ramayans are some of the major examples.…