Weekend Reads
- No matter the result of the Uttar Pradesh elections, in both defeat and in victory, Brand Modi will stand tall, argues Prashant Jha in the Hindustan Times.
- The Times of India tells the sordid tale of how the Delhi Police framed Mohammad Rafiq in a 2005 bomb blast in a Delhi bus.
- As chaotic as the trust vote was in the Tamil Assembly on Saturday, it was much worse 29 years ago, recounts K Deepalakshmi in the Hindu.
- In Open magazine, Rahul Pandita writes about the Dholkal Ganesh, allegedly vandalised by Naxalite forces in the Dantewada region of Chhatisgarh.
- A lack of sophisticated markets in India up to that point, in comparison to Europe and China, may suggest its economy was underdeveloped even before the British arrived, argues Sidin Vadukut in Mint.
- Should elections be state-funded? Yogendra Yadav, Manish Tiwari and SY Quaraishi debate this issue in the Hindu.
- In the Telegraph, Ramachandra Guha reviews Milan Vaishnav’s new book, When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics.
- In Swarajya, noted Indologist Debashish Banerji , Dr Jeffery Long, and Dr Asko Parpolathe discuss how the Indus script might represent a Dravidian language, the coming of the Aryans to India and the origins of Hinduism.
- In the London Review of Books, Adam Shatz explains what United States president, Donald Trump’s statements on the Palestinian two-state solution mean.
- What we now know as “Mandarin” is a language invented by a committee in modern China – a country with at least seven mutually incomprehensible languages all known as “Chinese”. The story of China’s state language is told in David Moser’s A Billion Voices, reviewed in the Wall Street Journal by Peter Neville-Hadley.
- In the New York Review of Books, Jackson Lears reviews Stephen Kinzer’s book, The True Flag which tells the history of the United States’ first empire which started around the year 1900.
Giggle
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