India’s oldest Socialist Weekly!
Editor: Dr. G.G. Parikh | Associate Editor: Neeraj Jain | Managing Editor: Guddi
Belafonte’s activism changed America, his singing shaped a musical consciousness for generations of Americans, and his acting paved the way for Black performers.
Gathered here are uncommonly beautiful reflections on the singular power of music by some of humanity’s greatest writers, collected over years of reading.
April 9 marks the US activist-singer’s 125th birth anniversary. Paul Robeson, son of a formerly enslaved man, was nothing less than amazing. Two articles.
An excerpt from ‘Dharma: Hinduism and Religions in India’ by Chaturvedi Badrinath. He writes: It is a fact of profound significance that the only identity ancient Indian thinkers gave to themselves was in terms of dharma — which they conceived to be the identity of man anywhere.
He was an amazingly secular person. The ease with which Bismillah, a Shia musician, embraced the tenets of the Hindu faith seems improbable in the present day.
A poem.
It cannot be understood by an ideology that thinks of every “other” as an enemy within.
Although Jeffers is celebrated as one of the great environmental poets, he was as enchanted by the wonders of nature, for he understood better than any artist since Whitman that these are parts of a single and awesome reality, and we are part of it too — not as spectators, not as explorers, but as living stardust.
In the midst of all the hullabaloo around the award to the musical score ‘Naatu Naatu’ at the Oscars Academy Awards ceremony, let us spare a few moments to see the song and its film in a wider context – which is both cultural, historical and political.
The great British philosopher, mathematician, historian, and Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872–February 2, 1970) contemplated the question of what could be the measure of a life well lived in this wonderful short essay penned in his eighty-first year.
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