Sunday Posts

India is a proud democratic country, even more so after the magic of a clear majority has been achieved by the new administration in Delhi after quarter of a century of coalition politics. Everywhere one goes, democratic pride is in display: If some people started doubting if a democratic system will only produce politics of division, they have now been thoroughly convinced that Indian democracy is a system that works. In this rather triumphalist environment, it is rather blasphemous to question whether democracy is enough in itself. Indeed, blogging with a contrarian opinion is quite hazardous in India, where people are commonly arrested for political opinions using colonial era gagging laws. Besides, even if there is no legal ground to arrest someone, smashing up people's houses by agitated supporters of one party or the other is quite common. TV channels are routinely silenced, either by political mandate or by corporate takeovers, with the objective of squashing any criti...

As it happens, during the course of last few days, I came across two very specific instances of questioning the value of freedom. One was specifically about academic freedom, and the other about freedom in general. Set in context of the rhetoric that freedom is central to progress, these are rather surprising points of views, hence demand further exploration. In the first instance, I am referring to John Morgan's China on Fast Track in Times Higher Education of 19th December. One of the central issues this article grapples with is whether the lack of academic freedom will stall the progress of Chinese universities in the global league tables. Indeed, academic freedom is sacrosanct in the Western academic circles, and that one can conduct meaningful research and teaching without the freedom to explore anything that inspires curiousity and without the freedom to express one's opinion sounds deeply anachronistic.  Various interviews presented in this article tell of a d...

So, shutters down at the News of The World, and welcome, probably, to Sun on Sunday. It is not just the saddest moment of British journalism, a trade that sustained the world's oldest surviving democracy and helped, I shall argue, to make the case for free speech all over the world. It is an epiphany about what happens when a trade, a profession loses its purpose, and becomes a tool of production of profit and power. Lessons have to be learned, not just by the Murdoch mafia and their cronies, but by the man on the street perhaps: That the freedoms we take for granted are hard-earned and must be protected every day, and such. But, first the bad news. News of the World paints an astonishing picture of a business at its worst, when responsibility was thrown out of the window in pursuit of profit and power, and little people, sadly and cynically engaged in keeping their jobs, carried out heinous crimes, no less serious and offensive than sex abuses and murders they reported, at the be...