Ashwini Upadhyay, who recently resigned from the AAP National Executive has brought serious charges of CIA involvement against AAP. I am generally inclined to dismiss these as conspiracy theories of a disgruntled member, though the CIA does have a long record of political interventions throughout the world, interfering in democratic processes for its own objectives and […]
The doctrine of religious freedom is enshrined in the UN charter under the declaration of Universal Human Rights and also in article 25 of the Indian constitution. Both these declarations state that the right to “change” one’s religion is a universal human right. The Indian constitution goes further by including the right to “propagate” one’s […]
To liberate Indians from self-imposed colonial shackles. A few weeks ago I was giving a talk at a college in Gurgaon in Haryana, India, when a young student raised her hand. Urvashi was visibly nervous; I could see that it took a lot of courage for her to speak up in Hindi. “Where can I […]
Naveen Jain, CEO of Intelius, shares his unique, minimalist and highly effective approach to entrepreneurship. I was on my way to Naveen Jain’s office when I realized that I only had a vague idea of where his office was. Usually, when meeting with ‘big’ executives, a secretary or assistant would schedule the time and send […]
This is the original version of the article that caused Microsoft to replace Encarta’s article on Hinduism. This later was anthologized in the book: “Invading the Sacred” published by Rupa Press. Click for a PDF version of the article. The scholarship of certain sections of the academic community studying Hinduism has been controversial in the Indian […]
Building on Our Own Traditions “Aap Hindu ho ya Muslim?” (Are you a Hindu or a Muslim?) It was an innocent question asked by Salma,* a pretty ten-year-old girl studying in a village school in the outskirts of Jaipur. She addressed it to Naren, a young college student and aspiring journalist, who accompanied me to […]
By Sankrant Sanu. Art of Living is a spiritual foundation. Started from scratch by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar about 25 years ago, it now has a presence in over 140 countries, with over 20 million people worldwide having taken its programs. Even by the measure of entrepreneurial success alone, that is an amazing story. Sankrant […]
In his recent Republic Day address, Indian president Abdul Kalam spoke about what has become a hot topic in India today. He said: “…There are only three members of the society who can remove corruption… They are father, mother and elementary school teacher.” The implication of his remarks is that widespread problem of corruption in […]
Introduction Religion and secularism are both hot topics of discussion in India today. With rare exceptions, commentators on all sides of the debate in India, suffer from a general malady – that of using Western[i] terms, categories and worldviews to understand an Eastern society. We explore how adopting Western worldviews and nomenclature has distorted the […]
We have been busy learning many a thing in adopting a Western lifestyle—among these consumerism, new means of environmental destruction and a fragmenting social structure—yet we haven’t emulated the American systems that are far more effective than those in India today—the systems of local governance. These systems of governance reflect a fundamental difference in the […]
[The way forward is not about going back to some hypothetical golden age or denying that we have real problems to solve today. But our problems appear unsolvable because we have failed to understand ourselves in our own language, on our own terms.] Some years ago I was out on a date with an American […]
Sankrant.org surveyed AAP core volunteers, included people that were AAP candidates for the Lok Sabha elections. The results showed disappointment at the election results and uncertainty about the party’s future direction. However, nearly half of those surveyed still said they trusted AAP’s leadership despite the problems. Nearly 9% of the respondents were AAP Lok Sabha […]
The proposed Education Bill 2003, up for debate in parliament, seeks to make primary education “free and compulsory.” This enabling legislation, which will give effect to last year’s decision to make education a fundamental right, is a noble goal, but its implications for contemporary Indian conditions must be understood alongside this intention. The first question […]
Sankrant Sanu responds to Arundhati Roy’s speech at the World Social Forum Dear Arundhati: I enjoyed reading your first novel. I respect some of the stands you have taken. I write this to you because I fear your methods will seriously undermine the very causes you espouse. You care about India. You care about the […]
WE are a nation of entrepreneurs. It may have been
hard to tell this in the days before the economic
liberalization of the 1990s and the time of the
license raj, but entrepreneurs existed even then. They were the
vendors you can still find in country buses, peddling little plastic
knickknacks and bottles of cure-all powders. You can find them
on street pavements. And you can find them in rural settings—
the craftsmen, the farmer, the traders—all managing their
businesses without relying on salaries or handouts.
Culture and success of a venture—or indeed, of a country—are inevitably connected. India’s dysfunctional systems that hamper rather than enable growth are so often pinned down to cultural problems. Is this accurate, and is there a way out? An article in a business daily some months ago claimed that Indians don’t give back to society […]
हादसा (Accident) १९७५ में रची प्रो० महेन्द्र प्रताप की कविता जो आपातकाल में प्रतिबन्धित रही। संग्रह “दहन ” से। English translation Accident (from “The Burning”) Two months ago The country was admitted To the Emergency Ward For a grievous wound, Some grave danger! The wound is deep A head injury An imminent coma No […]
Hinduism Encarta replaced its article on Hinduism after my critique of it was published. This is the replacement article from Encarta 2008 (now out of print) that was written by Prof. Arvind Sharma and edited by me. -Sankrant. I – INTRODUCTION II – WHAT IS HINDUISM? A – The Dharmic Tradition B – […]
The attacks in Paris on Charlie Hebdo bring to a fore fault lines in Europe. It has fuelled a European right that is calling for bans on Muslim immigrants. A major French TV anchor called for deportation of their existing Muslim population. For a while the hashtag #KillAllMuslims trended on Twitter. Germany saw anti-Muslim protests […]
India needs freedom from communalism of minority-majority politics. It may be the law of unintended consequences or it may simply be the result of the climate of partition in which our Constitution was framed. Whatever the reason, the Indian Constitution has significant communal clauses that result in separatism and religious identity politics. Constitutional reform is […]
[Plight of Indian women is a marketing tool for the Global evangelical movement.] Rape is a terrible crime, a case where the victims are overwhelmingly women and the perpetrators overwhelmingly men. Every rape carries with it a personal story of trauma. To use statistics to speak about rape appears to dehumanize it into a number. […]
[India needs a decentralised education model that does not impose city standards on schools in villages and tribal areas.] “India is more illiterate than it was fifty or a hundred years ago, and so is Burma, because the British administrators, when they came to India, instead of taking hold of things as they were, […]
The doctrine of religious freedom is enshrined in the UN charter under the Declaration of Universal Human Rights and also in article 25 of the Indian constitution. Both these declarations state that the right to “change” one’s religion is a universal human right. The Indian constitution goes further by including the right to “propagate” one’s […]
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown visited Islamabad and gave 6 million pounds (about Rs 433 million) to Pakistan’s government as a reward for the attacks on Mumbai, carried out by trained Pakistani militants. Not that Gordon Brown meant to encourage terrorism. Quite the contrary. The funds were given to Pakistan for counter-terrorism support. But in the […]
About five years ago a New Jersey entrepreneur called Rajiv Malhotra wrote a column on Sulekha titled “RISA Lila 1: Wendy’s Child Syndrome”—a provocative critique of prominent academics in Hinduism studies in the US. This sparked off a rather unique debate that spanned tens of articles and thousands of comments on Sulekha over the last many years. Many people found […]
In my quest far and wide for a society that had achieved equality I reached the Republic of Ladnam. At the border, there was a big arched gate made of stone. On it were pasted large irregular plastic letters, some of which had fallen off, reading “M_rit is _ _yth.” Lounging around the gate were some disheveled […]
President Musharraf has made many speeches. This is the speech that (were he to make it) would change the course of Indo-Pakistan relations. Unfortunately, it would take a greater leader than Musharraf to make this speech. Here it is, with the hope that it may still get some Pakistani ears . I begin in the […]
Author’s note: I started writing this article, with the above title, before it was announced that Daniel Pearl was killed. Since then this fact has apparently been confirmed, which makes the thesis of this article even more relevant. That Daniel Pearl was dead had become increasingly likely for some time. Enough clues were available that […]
You may end up making a lot of money as an entrepreneur. But if you count your rewards only by the amount of money you make, you will be poorer for it. Entrepreneurship is a journey of self-discovering, of learning, of stretching one’s limits. When you do it because it is what you want to do, and you follow your passion, the work becomes its own reward.
Recently, I was privileged to hear Dr. Abdul Kalam speak at The Indus Entrepreneurs (TIE) event in Seattle on the topic “Entrepreneurs in a nation’s development: Vision 2020.” In the context of Vision 2020, his vision of a developed India, Dr. Kalam spoke on leadership and his ideas on how to counteract corruption in India. […]
[New Delhi: Left leaders protest against Israel’s attack on Gaza at Parliament House in New Delhi on July 18. PTI Photo by Atul Yadav] Palestine is a pivotal cause for the Global left ummah. This support is a puzzle. It is certainly not the pre-eminent human rights crisis in our neighborhood or even in […]
[Avadhoot Bhagwan Ram Kustha Sewa Ashram reportedly treating the highest number of leprosy patients in the world] Avadhoot Bhagwan Ram Kustha Sewa Ashram reportedly treating the highest number of leprosy patients in the world A few years ago I had visited Amravati near Nagpur. An NRI I knew had for some years funded […]
[Instead of pushing India’s national security agenda, when even the US is sensitised to it given the egregious nature of the Mumbai attacks, Rahul deflects the US ambassador away from the LeT threat with the claim that “Hindu groups”, in particular Opposition party leader, Narendra Modi was the bigger threat.] In 1972 in the US, […]
[With all of Narendra Modi’s good intentions, broom-wielding politicians are not going to create a swachh bharat. Instead, we need massive investment in solid and liquid waste management in India.] For the success of Prime Minister Modi’s Swachh Bharat campaign it is important to focus on the issue of civic infrastructure for waste management rather […]
I recently read a news report which said that planning for Varanasi’s development is in high gear. This is welcome news. One of the highlights being touted is a scheme for ‘sixty flyovers’ to reduce traffic congestion. This is hardly a highlight. It is shortsighted to look at Varanasi’s planning as that for any other […]
“You’re entitled to your own opinions. You’re not entitled to your own facts.” Attributed to US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Gen. V K Singh’s appellation of “presstitutes” in a Tweet caused a storm of responses in the media. If simple remark that media finds Yemen less exciting than my attending PAK day is contorted […]
The “Love Jihad” controversy has been generating more heat than light. NDTV’s Sreenivasan Jain weighed in with an analysis of rape numbers by community, without normalising for relative population sizes. While Rupa Subramanya critiqued the analysis, we are still left with more heat than light. What is love jihad? Is it real? Is it possible to quantify? […]
Locating Doniger in the discourse of power “I set out to grasp the mechanisms of the effective exercise of power; and I do this because those who are inserted in these relations of power, who are implicated therein, may, through their actions, their resistance, and their rebellion, escape them, transform them—in short, no longer submit […]
