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Close to 150 years after he was born, how relevant is Mahatma Gandhi? In our country, he is revered as the Father of the Nation; his face still adorns currency notes, postage stamps and government offices; streets and welfare schemes continue to be named after him but has he been reduced to a mere symbol? Do his values, message and sacrifice have any meaning for us in the twenty-first century? In Why Gandhi Still Matters, the Mahatma's grandson and award-winning writer and scholar Rajmohan Gandhi, appraises Gandhi and his legacy by examining some of his most famous (and often most controversial) ideas, beliefs, actions, successes and failures. He analyses Gandhi's commitment to democracy, se...
This collection of essays engages with the persistence of religion in the modern world, the rise of processes of rationalization, secularization, and cultural change. It argues that the rise of religion as a faith and as a political ideology made the last century a short one. Expectations ofthe decline of religion were never fulfilled. In these circumstances freedom of religion and religious pluralism acquired great salience. Secularism has been viewed critically and some forms of it have turned out to be seriously flawed. The volume further argues that the relationship betweenfundamentalism and secularism is more complex than previously imagined and not merely one of antagonism.
In This Bold And Challenging New Book, The Author Charts The Shifting Dynamics Of Religion, Community And Civil Society In An Era Which Has Seen The Concurrent Rise Of Mass Media, Globalization And Religious Fundamentalism.
July 1991 was a momentous month in the contemporary economic history of India, when a market-friendly set of policies shifted the centre of country's political economy more rightward than ever before. This book examines the 1990-91 reforms from different ideological perspectives. Authors from diverse backgrounds track the origins and continuation of liberal policies, dissecting the role of the state over the last 25 years in addressing issues like poverty, nutrition, and income inequality. It argues that neo-liberal globalisation, global capitalism and inclusive development have come to constitute the new order of things in the Indian economy, and examines the economic and social outcomes of the non-interventionist state. Explaining why there is still widespread dissatisfaction with the progress and outcome of reforms, the book elaborates on India's tumultuous start in the new millennium.
An exquisite examination of a sexual culture in crisis What if we took sex out of the box marked “special,” either the worst or best thing that a human person can experience, and considered it within the complexity of reality? In this extraordinary book, despite longstanding tabloid-style sexual preoccupations with monsters and victims, shame and virtue, JoAnn Wypijewski does exactly that. From the HIV crisis to the paedophile priest panic, Woody Allen to Brett Kavanaugh, child pornography to Abu Ghraib, Wypijewski takes the most famous sex panics of the last decades and turns them inside out, weaving what together becomes a searing indictment of modern sexual politics, exposing the myriad ways sex panics and the expansion of the punitive state are intertwined. What emerges is an examination of the multiple ways in which the ever-expanding default language of monsters and victims has contributed to the repressive power of the state. Politics exists in the mess of life. Sex does too, Wypijewski insists, and so must sexual politics, to make any sense at all.
Compelling, incisive and wonderfully readable. Whether writing about politics or culture, whether profiling individuals or analyzing a social trend, Ramachandra Guha displays a masterly touch, confirming his standing as India’s most admired historian and public intellectual.
New perspectives on the history of famine—and the possibility of a famine-free world Famines are becoming smaller and rarer, but optimism about the possibility of a famine-free future must be tempered by the threat of global warming. That is just one of the arguments that Cormac Ó Gráda, one of the world's leading authorities on the history and economics of famine, develops in this wide-ranging book, which provides crucial new perspectives on key questions raised by famines around the globe between the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries. The book begins with a taboo topic. Ó Gráda argues that cannibalism, while by no means a universal feature of famines and never responsible for mo...
JP to BJP throws light on Bihar politics and presents an engrossing tale of Bihar's journey from socialism to Saffron nationalism.
Why India Votes? offers a fascinating account of the Indian electorate through a series of comprehensive ethnographic explorations conducted across the country — Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Rajasthan. It probes the motivations of ordinary voters, what they think about politicians, the electoral process, democracy and their own role within it. This book will be useful to scholars and students of political science, anthropology and sociology, those in media and politics, and those interested in elections and democracy as also the informed general reader.