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2 months ago | 
openthemagazine.com | S Prasannarajan |Ullekh NP |Rajeev Deshpande |Madhavankutty Pillai
MK Stalin brandishes Tamil as a political weapon. How desperate is he?
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Jan 9, 2025 | 
openthemagazine.com | S Prasannarajan
HISTORY, WHEN TAKEN OUT of the exigencies of punditry, is a strange judge—only if we don’t abandon the habit of invoking history to authenticate our political preferences. Or it may be that we look back to appreciate the past through the prism of the present, certainly when the present rages against our political beliefs. History can only oblige. Evaluation in retrospect is invariably coloured by the ideas and attitudes of the moment, and it is most evident in the time of transitions.
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Dec 5, 2024 | 
openthemagazine.com | S Prasannarajan
Columns | LocomotifWe read Alexei Navalny's Patriot at a time when the word has become an ideological marker ALEXEI NAVALNY, the man Vladimir Putin feared the most and who died the way enemies die in Russia, should have called his memoir, posthumously published, ‘Prisoner’. He chose to call it Patriot. Perhaps he knew, or the ghosts from the living gulag of Russia had whispered to him, that the difference was nullified by the personal history of dissent.
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Nov 29, 2024 | 
openthemagazine.com | S Prasannarajan |Rajeev Deshpande |Jyotsna Purandare |Minhaz Merchant
STORIES IN THIS ISSUE S Prasannarajan We read Alexei Navalny's Patriot at a time when the word has become an ideological marker Rajeev Deshpande Devendra Fadnavis’ return as Maharashtra chief minister is a remarkable comeback story that transforms the state’s political landscape Jyotsna Purandare Balasaheb Thackeray’s Shiv Sena has passed into the hands of Eknath Shinde Minhaz Merchant The West must pay for the climate crisis Sudeep Paul Will Trump’s pick for FBI director be a reformer or a...
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Nov 28, 2024 | 
openthemagazine.com | S Prasannarajan
WITH DEFEATS COLLAPSE carefully cultivated illusions. In politics, such disintegrations—the suddenly deflated confidence and the oppressive sprawl of debris—are difficult to accept, unless you are a qualified stoic straying into the arena. Defeats downsize those who have supersized themselves as reality-defying heroes. The pathetic part is the fallen struggling to rise from the ruins, and getting visions of the Dark Denier looming over them.
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Nov 28, 2024 | 
rb.gy | S Prasannarajan
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Nov 14, 2024 | 
openthemagazine.com | S Prasannarajan
Columns | LocomotifEnglish novelist Samantha Harvey, the winner of 2024 Booker Prize, takes a cosmic leap of imagination to appreciate Earth “ROTATING ABOUT THE EARTH in their spacecraft they are so together, and so alone, that even their thoughts, their internal mythologies, at times convene.” At two hundred and fifty miles above the Earth, they, six astronauts of different nationalities, circle the planet they left behind sixteen times a day, watching sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets.
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Nov 7, 2024 | 
openthemagazine.com | S Prasannarajan
Cover Story | LocomotifHow Donald Trump won this century’s fiercest argument for power THAT IMAGE, IN RETROSPECT, forms the centrespread of American mythology: His face bloodied, his fist in the air, the man who just defied the assassin’s bullet stood there, rising from near-death, chanting, fight… fight… fight… Donald Trump has been fighting all along, as candidate and convict, as provocateur and pariah, alone in his ambition but with millions on his mission.
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Oct 30, 2024 | 
openthemagazine.com | S Prasannarajan
Columns | LocomotifTrump is the axis as well as the argument in the narrative war of America (Illustrations: Saurabh Singh) NARRATIVE MAY BE A WORD that fills the void in a sentence short of ideas. It is still the word that has become indispensable in the election that crowns the Year of Elections, a spectacular finale and a vindication: democracy, fake versions included, is the most shared idea of governance despite dire reminders from its sceptics.
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Oct 17, 2024 | 
openthemagazine.com | S Prasannarajan
Columns | Locomotif South Korea as a cultural superpower IN THE EARLY PAGES of The Vegetarian, the novel that brought South Korean novelist Han Kang, the new Nobel laureate in literature, to the world, Yeong-hye, an ordinary housewife who refuses to wear a bra and loves reading, stands there in front of the fridge at four in the morning. That is the beginning of her vegetarianism—and a transformation as Kafkaesque as it could be. She throws away all the meat, setting off a violent play of...
