Weekend Reads

  1. The Naxalbari movement was a continuation of the nationally revered Champaran satyagraha of 1917, argues Dipankar Bhattacharya in Outlook magazine.
  2. Assembly elections: In the Indian Express, Leena Misra explains why Patidar leader Hardik Patel is drawing such crowds in Gujarat.
  3. Pogroms in republican India don’t hurt the parties that organise them. They help their cause, writes Mukul Kesavan in the Telegraph.
  4. Mandatory versus voluntary patriotism: Following JRD Tata, we should make our patriotism deep and substantial, rather than cheap and jingoistic, argues Ramachandra Guha in the Hindustan Times.
  5. Dadabhai Naoroji, the first Indian elected to the UK House of Commons, lent his energies to causes as diverse as the women’s suffrage movement and Indian self-rule, writes Manu Pillai in the Mint.
  6. How Kipling helped quell an Indian mutiny in First World War trenches, writes Jamie Doward in the Guardian.
  7. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ We Were Eight Years in Power fleshes out White supremacy not as a political ideology, but as the defining feature of the US polity – its essential nature, writes Melvin Rogers in the Boston Review.
  8. Like nationality, the identification with an inside group, to the exclusion of others on the outside, is essential to all religions, argues Time Crane in the Times Literary Supplement.
  9. The web began dying in 2014, argues Andre Staltz. It was originally a peer-to-peer network with no dependency on a singly part – but now the dominance of Facebook, Amazon and Google threaten that aim.
  10. Why Einstein just got ranked as history’s greatest hero, explains Brian Gallagher in Nautilus.
  11. Academic philosophy in the West ignores and disdains the thought traditions of China, India and Africa. This must change, argues Nigel Warburton in Aeon.
  12. Writing in the New Yorker, Alex Wellerstein remembers Laika, space dog and Soviet hero.