Imagine a very big casino. Millions of people have been invited to play the game. Everyone receives the same rules. Everyone is told that if they play well, they will win. The game appears fair because everyone enters through the same door and, at the end, everyone leaves with a result. Some players, of course, […]
“The revolution lags behind itself.” —Henri Lefebvre, The Explosion: Marxism and the French Upheaval “I hope to find “What is denied to me.” –Paul Eluard, ‘The Corner’ (1937) Theory on the Run: What and Why? It is perhaps in the fitness of things that one begins with a confession. What follows here, by way […]
If democracy is to be qualified as one, it cannot, by and large, ban protest. But protest is not simply what democracy allows. It is something people make and remake, deciding themselves how to bargain with those who holds power, when to be restrained and when to be angry. Perhaps what matters, then, is not […]
An ordinary citizen who prefers not to use digital mobile devices recently struggled to obtain an appointment at a Sri Lankan government department because he did not have a mobile phone number. A security guard issuing token numbers asked for a phone number to register the appointment. The citizen explained that he does not use […]
Antonio Gramsci’s line from a fascist prison in the early 1930s has been quoted into cliché ever since: the old world is dying, and the new cannot yet be born, and in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. South Asia, in this decade, can be one of the clearest demonstrations of that. […]
Governments do not lose public trust in a single day, its lost through silence when people demand answers, through arrogance when criticism deserves humility, and through the dangerous illusion that electoral victory alone guarantees political legitimacy. Nepal appears to be entering precisely such a moment. The government led by the Rastriya Swatantra Party came to […]
‘We need to create sober, patient people, who do not despair in the face of the worst horror and who do not get excited about every little thing. Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.’ Those very lines Antonio Gramsci wrote, kept repeating in my head every time I heard a new headline about […]
