Sunday Posts

As Bernie Sanders catches up with Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump raves and rages, and Jeremy Corbyn holds on - even if rather precariously - at the British Labour Party, we can reasonably think that an era of anti-Politics has began. The slick politics of the mid-90s, when Centrism took hold, but all it meant was a breed of cynical politicians who stood for nothing but the craving of power (brilliantly represented in Frank Underwood in the US version of The House of Cards), seems all but gone. Ideology, of sensible and insensible variety, is back in the mix, all over again. This is counter-intuitive. As we entered the Age of the Millennial, we were expecting a sweeping victory for those smooth-tongued Centrists, who wanted to hold the centre-stage, but not any ground in anything else. The millennial would be, we expected, products of a 'liquid' modernity,  for whom the pursuit of pleasure, rather than any fixed commitment, is all pervasive. But their surging support for al...

Politics is back on the agenda. For some, history ended in 1990. We arrived at a final, stable, interminable age of Capitalism, a vantage point of predicting the future where every next year was supposed to be better than the last, and constant progress could happen without changing the society. In fact, at that very moment, society stopped to matter, as the profound enabling of the individual meant that we can just pursue our own well-being, leaving the idea of progress to the workings of the market, which took care of itself. It was not very unlike what people thought before the death of God, but a radical departure from the ideas of enlightenment, when, humans became political animals with the slogan of daring to know. It is paradoxical, as at the moment of complete empowerment of the individual, a logical progression of the enlightened ideas, we chose - choice being the main theme here - to give up our powers to transform societies any further and accept the autonomous wo...

A few weeks ago, after a meeting with an old friend from Egypt in London's Southbank, I was sad and depressed: My friend, who had always agitated against Mubarak's rule while she was in London and moved back to Egypt after the Cairo spring, felt that the revolution had not moved the country forward. Mubarak is gone, but the long shadow of the army was everywhere: As she put it, the country now has a neo-liberal theocracy, a strange coalition of interests which is pushing the country to backwards. Apparently the coalition was more fragile than previously thought. Within two weeks of that meeting, protestors are back in Tahrir Square and the Army is back. The reversal of Arab Spring has now started. Indeed, the army has taken powers in the name of people, and have no doubt blessings of the US State Department. The ex-President and his team is under house arrest. The first counter-revolution in the modern time seems complete. Every Egyptian will have a view about what hap...