Technological progress has taken very diverse forms in different environmental conditions and periods of history, so diverse that it has sometimes not even been recognized as such when viewed through unfamiliar eyes. ‘No Chinese peasant’, commented Victor Hugo, ‘goes to the city without carrying back, at the end of his bamboo, two buckets of what we call filth.’ Europeans naturally found it an abhorrent practice.
Come, screaming with all your fourteen mouths, You speechless hysteria hurting in each limb of my nation, Come to me in the loneliness of your rage Come out foaming You the ‘Satvik’ blood of the centuries, I, a small poet Stand hankering for your language, Include me in your speech.With the untimely death of Dhoomil in February 1975, modern Hindi literature lost one of its most promising young poets. … .Dhoomil had managed to attract attention with his clear and refreshingly new imagery and his adroit use of the Hindi language as it is spoken on the streets.
Many of us have on occasion been dubious about the obsession in some circles to explain Indian culture entirely in terms of mysticism. This analysis by Staal of how to approach the study of mysticism is most valuable in that it not only puts the matter into a new perspective, but also because it suggests…
In 1963 Maulana Bhashani met Mao in Peking and Mao spoke to him about Pakistan, USA, USSR, and China. China’s relationship with Pakistan was extremely fragile at the time, Mao said to Bhashani, and the United States, Russia and India would do their utmost to break this relationship. Mao said: ‘You are our friend and if at the present moment you continue your struggle against the Ayub Government, it will only strengthen the hand of Russia, America and India.
The two authors of this book have over the years developed a type of book-making for themselves. The idea is to pick up some subject of recent history which is full of incident and drama, visit the site, read up as much as you can, interview such of the participants as are still around and then write a blow-by-blow, minute-byminute account.
Biography, according to Lytton Strachey, is ‘the most delicate and humane of all the branches of the art of writing’. It is also a difficult art particularly when the story told is that of Jawaharlal Nehru, a man who strode the world like ‘a gentle colossus’ until very recently, and whose life was an open one, openly lived almost in ‘the glorious privacy of light’.