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Dec 11, 2024 | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Ashish Ranjan |Vaishna Roy |Manash Bhattacharjee
At the launch of historian Aditya Mukherjee’s Nehru’s India: Past Present & Future in New Delhi earlier this month, invited speakers shared their own sense of intellectual, political and cultural affinity with Nehru, referring to certain highpoints of Mukherjee’s book in passing. I consider this an unsatisfactory gesture, as the book deserved primary engagement. Yet, I am willing to concede such a gesture is somewhat understandable in Nehru’s case.
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Nov 26, 2024 | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Mujibur Rehman |Vaishna Roy |Manash Bhattacharjee
In the months before Partition, Mahatma Gandhi travelled across India trying to prevent communal violence and what would become one of the 20th century’s greatest tragedies. Among those who witnessed his ultimately futile mission up close was his grandniece, Manu Gandhi. Her diary captures an intimate portrait of hope against darkness. Through her eyes, we see Gandhi’s final mission for peace, recorded in quiet moments between epochal changes.
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Nov 18, 2024 | 
outlookindia.com | Manash Bhattacharjee
InternationalSaudi Arabia has long faced criticism for its use of the death penalty, which human rights organisations have condemned as disproportionate and out of step with the country’s efforts to soften its strict image and attract international tourists and investors. Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
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Nov 14, 2024 | 
outlookindia.com | Manash Bhattacharjee
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... Student protesters with Bangladeshi flag | Photo: APStudent protesters with Bangladeshi flag | Photo: APBangladesh's Attorney General, Md Asaduzzaman, has stirred up controversy by suggesting changes to the country's constitution. Asaduzzaman proposed removing terms such as socialism, secularism, Bengali nationalism, and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's title as "Father of the Nation".
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Oct 12, 2024 | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Manash Bhattacharjee |Vivek Katju |Vaishna Roy
Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for her craft, the South Korean writer Han Kang was immediately faced with her sense of political responsibility. A writer is not an isolated being lost in the island of literature. She is a political being who lives in the midst of the world and writes of it. We learn of Han’s unique and intense approach to the problem of violence in her novel, Human Acts, published in English translation by Deborah Smith in 2016.
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Oct 5, 2024 | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Manash Bhattacharjee |Vivek Katju |Vaishna Roy
Two years before Tolstoy passed away at the age of 82, he wrote a letter, “A Letter to a Hindu”, dated 14 December 1908, in response to a letter from Tarak Nath Das, a Canadian immigrant from Bengal who ran the newspaper, Free Hindustan. The letter gained historical significance when Gandhi republished it with a short introduction a year later, on 19 November 1909, in his newspaper Indian Opinion published from South Africa.
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Oct 1, 2024 | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Manash Bhattacharjee |Aparna Eswaran |Silpa Satheesh |Arathi P.M
In May 1929, Gandhi received a letter from W.E.B. Du Bois, the Black American scholar and civil rights activist, via British missionary C.F Andrews. Du Bois expressed his pleasure at meeting Sarojini Naidu and Andrews, requesting Gandhi contribute a message for Black people in his magazine, The Crisis. Gandhi replied that attempting a message was “useless,” but sent a “little love message” instead: “Let not the 12 million Negroes be ashamed of the fact that they are the grandchildren of slaves.
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Sep 28, 2024 | 
scroll.in | Manash Bhattacharjee
Final as marbleyour absence will sadden other afternoons. — Jorge Luis Borges, from “Parting”Avinash Shrestha’s collection of poetry The Dust Draws Its Face on the Wind translated from the Nepali into English by Rohan Chhetri evokes a landscape of feelings that translates the outside/outer into the inside/inner. The very first poem, “Relative”, is a vertigo of paradoxes.
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Sep 9, 2024 | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Suhrid Sankar Chattopadhyay |Vaishna Roy |Manash Bhattacharjee
For dialogue,first ask, then… listen. From Proverbs and Songs by Spanish poet Antonio Machado In a conversation at Texas University, Dallas, on September 9, opposition leader Rahul Gandhi touched on some key principles of his politics that hold much promise for the future of democracy. I want to unpack some of the ideas he mentioned in this illuminating meeting.
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Sep 6, 2024 | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Manash Bhattacharjee |Suhrid Sankar Chattopadhyay |Vaishna Roy
A Hindu boy belonging to a privileged caste, Aryan Mishra, who was a student of Class XII, was “mistaken” to be part of a group of cow smugglers and shot in the head by Gau Rakshaks, a vigilante gang of cow protectors, while travelling in an SUV with friends in Faridabad, Haryana. When The Print journalist Sagrika Kissu met the father of the deceased boy, he said the criminals at a local jail in Faridabad regretted mistaking a “Brahmin” for a “Muslim”.
