For An Informed Ambedkar Age
Anu Ramdas The Jan Lokpal bill is under 35 pages. The creators of this document successfully manufactured a ‘revolution’ out of this. The corporate media sold it as such, and some academics called it a ‘movement’. Media and academia largely did not comment on the contents of the document. Their preoccupation was with the …
Kuffir As the court in the Siberian town of Tomsk deliberates on whether the Bhagvat Gita is ‘extremist’ literature, the Indian government and parliament seem to have forgotten their own sanctimonious injunction of ‘non-inteference in the internal affairs of other countries’ (used traditionally to defend such obnoxious pratices as ‘untouchability’ and ‘caste discrimination’) to …
Karthik Navayan [A February, 2010 article in Oneworld South Asia gives us an idea about the scale of the problem of ‘witch-hunting’ in rural India: ‘Statistics on witch-hunting crimes compiled by the National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) are a cause of concern. The NCRB reported that in 2007, 177 cases of witchcraft-related murders were reported …
Milon Das We live in one of the poorest countries of the world. From a geographical perspective, Bangladesh is located within the Indian sub-continent. And here, since a very long time, the caste system has engulfed all venues of life. Many think that Bangladesh being predominantly a Muslim country caste discrimination does not apply to …
Prabin Dhangada Majhi Even the staunchest supporters of reservation flinch at the question of rich SC/ST students hogging the quota.The following discussion, on a request from fellow blogger Yayavar, assumes we have a similar understanding of the reservation policy which I have outlined previously. So I’ll build up on that, and in case we differ, …
Prabin Dhangada Majhi We must begin with an education in democracy. Without assuming democracy can be of just one form and can be summed up only thus, let’s define it as a process where all citizens participate in decision making and are influenced, equally. Because, most large democracies are representative democracies following an aggregation of …
Translation by Lavanya Raj Bharathi An atrocity such as this continues unstopped, only in Tamilnadu. This atrocity is yet another example for how caste inequalities run strong and deep in the state’s soil, like the roots of the Banyan. On Wednesday, the Kayaththar panchayat (near Kovilpatti) committee meeting took place in the panchayat committee office. …
by Thamburaj Dharmaraj (Continued from The Touch of Ambedkar (Part I)) The shadow puppeteers’ mother tongue is not Tamil. Among themselves they speak a remote dialect of Marathi, which is their only communicative medium. To interact with others they use Tamil language. They claim their caste identity as ‘Mandikar’. The names of men of this …
by Thamburaj Dharmaraj The assignment is of performing the story of Ambedkar in a folk art form, shadow puppetry. Shadow puppet theatre is widely held in the southern districts of Tamilnadu. Though it is prevalent in most of the South Asian countries it is habitually getting ostracized in the villages and performance opportunity is on …