Politics & Society
Nitasha Kaul

MC Kash: That Bayonet of a Voice

Music is the beautiful struggle of sound into expression. Because we feel, we sing. When we speak, when we scream, when we laugh, when we wail, there is a soundtrack to our thoughts that iconic music can render into songs.

Politics & Society
Nitasha Kaul

India/China/Kashmir/Tibet

To whom does Kashmir and Tibet belong? India (or Pakistan) and China or to Kashmiris and Tibetans? In early June, a conference in London brought together writers, activists and intellectuals to discuss the issue of Tibet and Kashmir with a

Politics & Society
Nitasha Kaul

Night As It Was

In the day, the sun. At night, the moon and stars. Clouds can come and go as they please. This had been the cosmic sequence in ImagiNation for as long as its inhabitants could remember. This is what their stories

Politics & Society
Nitasha Kaul

…Of A Woman’s Body

From the ancients to the moderns, in almost every culture globally, women are seen primarily in terms of their ‘difference’ from the standard norm of the male body. This plays out in many ways: If a man is provider, the

Politics & Society
Nitasha Kaul

Hunger, Resistance and Creativity

In an iconic modernist novel by a Nobel Prize winning writer (Hunger, Knut Hamsun), an unnamed young man wanders daily through the city streets, frantic and crazed, with a starving belly and a head full of words. He wants to

Politics & Society
Saswat Pattanayak

The New Face of Truth: Julian Assange and the WikiLeaked World

“All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out.” (I. F. Stone) In many ways, Julian Assange is the “Izzy” of new journalism. Like Stone, Assange has not flinched from

Politics & Society
Saswat Pattanayak

70 Years of McDonald’s

“We cannot trust people who are nonconformists. The organization cannot trust the individual; the individual must trust the organization.” – Ray Kroc, founder, McDonald’s. Guided by Kroc’s philosophy, McDonald’s has dominated not just fast food retail business, but the fast

Politics & Society
Saswat Pattanayak

50 Years: Muhammad Ali’s Gold Medal

When Cassius Clay won the gold medal at 1960 Rome Olympics, he was proud of being American. In his characteristic manner, he declared his love: “To make America the greatest is my goal; so I beat the Russian and I

Politics & Society
Saswat Pattanayak

A World Without America

It’s coming to America first, the cradle of the best and of the worst. It’s here they got the range and the machinery for change and it’s here they got the spiritual thirst. It’s here the family’s broken and it’s

Politics & Society
Saswat Pattanayak

Pakistan: Dissent is Alive

For the mainstream media in Western democracies, carelessness is deliberate, while using words such as “Islam”, “terrorism”, and “jihad”. Perhaps the so-called Free Press, like the so-called Free Market are so driven by military-industrial complex that they routinely quote official