Anthem Without Nation

[rajesh-k-b]

After the Paris attacks: It’s time for a new Enlightenment | Pankaj Mishra

The long read: We must move past the tired debate that pits the modern west against its backward other and recover the Enlightenment ideal of rigorous self-criticism

"Differences of opinion are particularly stark between people whose lives are marked by Europe’s still largely unacknowledged past of colonialism and slavery, and those who see metropolitan Europe as the apotheosis of modernity: the place that made the crucial breakthroughs in politics, science, philosophy and the arts. Such divergent experiences have long coexisted but they make for greater public discordance today. Europe no longer confidently produces, as it did for two centuries, the surplus of global history; and the people Europe once dominated now chafe against the norms produced by that history."

[rajesh-k-b]

Somebody else's idea of somebody else's world is not my idea of things as they are.

Sun Ra And His Mystic Science Akestra (1971)

[rajesh-k-b]

Only in relation to what men are in their entirety can a social system be judged just or unjust: otherwise it can be merely assessed as relatively efficient or inefficient. The principle of equality is the revolutionary principle, not only because it challenges hierarchies, but because it asserts that all men are equally whole. And the converse is just as true: to accept inequality as natural is to become fragmented, is to see oneself as no more than the sum of a set of capacities and needs.

John Berger (1975) A Seventh Man, p. 145.

[rajesh-k-b]

With each migrant that arrives, an underdeveloped country is subsidizing a developed one... To those who have machines, men are given.

John Berger (1975) A Seventh Man, p.73.

[rajesh-k-b]

Werner Bischof

Anjali Hora, Dancer

Bombay, India, 1951

[rajesh-k-b]

[rajesh-k-b]

Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.

C. Wright Mills (1959) The Sociological Imagination, p.3.

[hutspotamsterdam]

[dastaanewatan]

A librarian at the Calcutta National Library divides books between the two countries following the India-Pakistan partition in 1947.

[rasarnava]

Narasimha disemboweling the demon Hiranyakashaipu from the Kalighat School, Calcutta, 1910. Narasimha is shown here more as a composite animal than as a man-lion. 

According to one scholar, “The western style of the demon’s shoes may…reflect the animosity toward the British, by equating them with the demon.”

[informationrepository]

[billyjane]

Lucia Moholy,1924-28 by László Moholy-Nagy [some of her work @ chagalov]

from Met Museum

[luciaodoom]

my name sister

[little-grapefruit]

Blue Water Lilies, Monet, c. 1917

[rajesh-k-b]

The Enigma of Arrival and the Afternoon by Giorgio de Chirico (1911-1912).

[lapitiedangereuse]

Persona ,1966

[rajesh-k-b]

Narendra Modi and the new face of India

With the rise of Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi culminating in this week's election, Pankaj Mishra asks if the world's largest democracy is entering its most sinister period since independence

[rajesh-k-b]

"I want to suggest that racism is not a side-issue in contemporary Britain; that it's not a peripheral minority affair. I believe that Britain is undergoing a critical phase of its post-colonial period, and this crisis is not simply economic or political. It's a crisis of the whole culture, of society's entire sense of itself. And racism is only the most clearly visible part of this crisis, the tip of the kind of iceberg that sinks ships."