South Asia Citizens Web

Even if there is no risk of sovereign default, India’s exposure and vulnerability to the moods of the global financial markets as well as the policy changes in the US is hugely greater now than in 1991. Inflation, already in double digits, is likely to get far worse as the Rupee depreciates, and will likely have political repercussions in this election year. High unemployment (of the educated and the illiterate), which has been an abiding concern since the early reform days, is going to persist and get much worse, as the economy slows down further, downsizing becomes the norm, hiring stops, and layoffs rise. All indications are of a spiralling down of economic activity as investment shows no signs of reviving, especially given the stagflationary environment and receding domestic demand, as disposable incomes fall, or fail to rise fast enough.

Do Indian elites have the courage and vision to suspend an unsustainable business-as-usual and build a new India, respectful of nature and the urgent needs of hundreds of millions?

A recently published anthology of visual narratives of Partition

Neighbouring country Bangladesh is going through a great churning.
As of now the most pressing question before everyone is how the process of elections to the next parliament would unfold itself.. Whether every political party would participate in it or not or the country is in for a period of further instability and political violence. Awami League led ruling dispensation and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) led opposition alliance seem to be at loggerheads at this juncture. The ongoing ‘war crimes trials’ has also seen diametrically opposite positions being adopted by both the Parties.

Introduction to Mahmud Hasan’s The Utopia of Student Movement by Nazmul Sultan for AlalODulal.org A poet by vocation, Mahmud Hasan lived in and through politics. That Mahmud Hasan did poetry under the condition of politics is not a historical anomaly. Sharing each other’s orbit, modern Bengali poetry and politics grounded themselves in an intersected domain. […]