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Showing posts from January, 2020

Impeachment drama and the 2020 presidential race

Impeachment drama and the 2020 presidential race On a cold January day in Washington DC, January 15 2020 to be precise, two signing ceremonies took place not too far from each other. One was where the US President Donald Trump signed the first phase of the US-China trade deal in the East Room of the White House. The deal promises to ease the tension, tariffs, and counter tariffs that has been lurking over the two trading partners ever since Trump took office. In the other signing ceremony a few blocks away, the US House Speaker Nancy Peolsi signed the two articles of impeachment against President Trump to be sent over to the US Senate for trial. These two signing ceremonies have come to symbolize what has become the reality of the American political landscape in the past four years or so. Ever since Donald Trump was elected as the 45th president of the United State of America in 2016, a section of the establishment both in the US media as well as in political circles, has remai

Ah, JNU(TA)

One can almost be assured that the JNUTA, the Left dominated teachers' association at JNU, is overtly or covertly, is behind most disturbances in JNU. We all know how they patronize the leftist goons as they themselves were during their own student days. These JNUTA-walas never liked the current VC. They want him gone so each one of them can supervise 30 PhD scholars (yes, one of them had 44 a couple of years ago), keep producing useless leftie 'scholars' and Urban Naxals, ke ep winning the JNUSU elections year after year, do all sorts of corruption and keep the Left hegemony alive in JNU and a few other select campuses.  What is getting lost in this current brawl is that it has been brewing for almost two months and JNU has been under siege from these leftists. There have been multiple cases of violence in the last two months. All one needs is to check the news. There has been violence, assault (the VC himself was assaulted), desecration of Swami Vivekananda’ moorti),

Indian Intellectuals: The New Rudalis of India

Indian Intellectuals: The New Rudalis of India “All men are intellectuals, but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals.” ~ Antonio Gramsci When Antonio Gramsci was describing ‘intellectuals’ in his famous ‘Prison Notebooks’, he appears to be representing the views of Yaska, the 7th century BCE Indian grammarian-linguist. I am not sure if there is a direct link between the two, but Yaska made a similar statement in his Nirukta while defending his view on how objects are named. Yaska is known for his pioneering work on the science of etymology, the Nirukta. Yaska was the first scholar to treat etymology as an independent science. He was also a great Sanskrit grammarian and he believed that all nouns are derived from verbs ( dhatuj/akhyataj ). This assertion, however, considering the great tradition of disputation and argumentation in the  Indic Knowledge Tradition  (IKT) wasn’t without controversy. Many grammarians, including Gargya, argued that if all n