South Asia Citizens Web

The news that, on January 7, Perin Chandra passed away at the ripe old age of 96 rekindled the memory of a day when 1941 was coming to a close. The All India Students Federation (AISF) was holding its conference in Patna. I had joined the previous year, and had come to attend the conference as a delegate from old Madhya Pradesh. Two women delegates (there were several more of course) from Lahore impressed all of us very much. One was Perin Bharucha and the other was Litto (who was later to marry Ajoy Ghosh).

Renowned theater personality Janab S.M. Mehdi passed away on 2 Jan. 2015
at Aligarh. A memorial meeting for him is being organised on 14th Jan. 2015 at 5.00 p.m. at Ghalib Institute (Aiwan-e-Ghalib), Mata Sundri Road, New Delhi.

Here are three extracts from Jawaharlal Nehru’s synopsis of world history called Glimpses of World History which he put together in the early thirties as a series of letters to his daughter. The extracts date from April and July 1933. Given that Nehru wrote Glimpses in a series of jails where he barely had access to any literature, his assessments of the Russian Revolution and admiration for Trotsky’s role in it are quite extraordinary. Like most of the book (1129 pages in the Penguin edition), the extracts reproduced here were written in the District Gaol, Dehra Dun.

THE mosque in Pakistan is now no longer just a religious institution. Instead it has morphed into a deeply political one that seeks to radically transform culture and society. Actively assisted by the state in this mission in earlier decades, the mosque is a powerful actor over which the state now exercises little authority.

The Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP) has become the living example of injustice, human rights violations and destruction of precious natural resources. Thousands of families of adivasis, farmers, labourers, fisher-people, potters, artisans and rural workers who are being affected by the dams and canals built under this project still await land-based rehabilitation, house plots at developed rehabilitation site as well as ensured alternative livelihood to landless families, as mandated by the law and successive judgments of the Supreme Court of India.