South Asia Citizens Web

We are writing to express our concern about the shameful incident at your TV channel on Oct 26, 2013 - Letter from Citizens for Free and responsible Media

Audio recording of the 19 January 2010 seminar by Markus Daechsel

Last year, on July 5, 2012, Algeria celebrated fifty years of independence from France. When Albert Camus perished in a car accident near Sens on January 4, 1960, at the age of forty-six, two and a half years before the Évian Accords that ended the war, he had become a figure of contempt and scorn for both the left and the right, seen as simultaneously naive and dogmatic in his persistent hope for a moderate Algerian solution. As late as 1958, Camus wrote that his aim was to “achieve the only acceptable future: a future in which France, wholeheartedly embracing its tradition of liberty, does justice to all the communities of Algeria without discrimination in favor of one or another.”

Sri Lanka’s authorities are in buoyant mood. As Prince Charles prepares to open the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Colombo, the Defence Ministry is helping to organise celebrations. But it isn’t the queen they are honouring. The CHOGM is gathering to acknowledge the Sri Lankan president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, as chairman of the Commonwealth, a position he will occupy for the next two years. His allies at home are delighted.

I HAVE always seen a similarity in their modus operandi, the wily deception with which Narendra Modi sends his secular detractors on desperate leather hunts and the confident ease with which the gang of bicycle thieves of ‘Bailey Gaarad’ indulged their bizarre vocation in the 1960s.