Activist for a Brave New Region

There are many people who dream but few can turn dreams into action. Kanak Mani Dixit is one of those very few whose dreams are endless and whose actualisations are many – a man whose actions have impacted far beyond his own native land and influenced the way many think about South Asia, its people and their historical purpose.
Kanak´s core background is journalism, and his success in this chosen field is above question. Steering the Himal publications, he has set editing and publishing standards for entire South Asia, in content planning, editing perspectives, and magazine design and graphics as well. Kanak has demonstrated that South Asian focal points don´t have to be located in the big countries of the region but can be anywhere that an idea is alive and can be nurtured… Continues in our blog with audio from the event of the award ceremony

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A Small Story by Joseph Mathai

The oracle has spoken. The reader of English books in India is a rich, lonely, serious, young man. The images evoked by this sentence could make it the opening line of any of the romance novels that women, a small percentage of the readers of English language books in India, like to read. Let us also pause for a moment in memory of the trees that were felled, to make the paper that ended up as the pages of the issue that circulated the findings Tehelka Readership Survey 2010. A set of 15-16 questions asked of a little over one thousand one hundred people outside bookshops in nine cities in India would but necessarily lead to formulations that even in casual conversations would be dismissed as a trite. Especially as we live in a context that does not lend itself well to sweeping statements, as Joan Robinson had said "whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true."

The world of books and ideas in India is a strange mix of contradictory currents and impulses… continues here

The Rhetoric of Relevance and the Graveyard of Gandhi by Vinay Lal

As the anniversary of Gandhi's death approaches, the tired old question of Gandhi's 'relevance' will be rehashed in the press.  Once we are past the common rituals, we are certain to hear that the spiral of violence in which much of the world seems to be caught demonstrates Gandhi's continuing 'relevance'. Barack Obama's ascendancy to the Presidency of the United States furnishes one of the latest iterations of the globalising tendencies of the Gandhian narrative.  Unlike his predecessor, who flaunted his disdain for reading, Obama is said to have a passion for books; and Gandhi's autobiography has been described as occupying a prominent place in the reading that has shaped the country's first African American President. Obama gravitated from "Change We Can Believe In" to "Change We Need", but in either case the slogan is reminiscent of the saying with which Gandhi's name is firmly, indeed irrevocably, attached:  "We Must Become the Change We Want To See In the World."  Obama's Nobel Prize Lecture twice invoked Gandhi, if only to rehearse some familiar clichés – among them, the argument, which is so seemingly infallible that it has been seldom scrutinized, that Gandhian nonviolence only succeeded because his foes were the gentlemanly English rather than Nazi brutes or Stalinist thugs… continues here