Weekend Reads

  • On the 127th birth anniversary of BR Ambedkar, with every political party rushing to celebrate him, the Indian Express’ Ravish Tiwari looks at how and why Ambedkar, one of the most contested pre-Independence figures, has today, six decades after his death, come to be the most embraced.
  • Prime Minister Narendra Modi needs to specifically address his supporters and partymen who are, even now, now shocked by the rape and murder of an eight-year old Muslim Bakharwal girl in Jammu, argues Mukul Kesavan in the Telegraph.
  • Without strong data law, India will end up as a digital colony of US or Chinese firms, argues Ravi Venkatesan in the Times of India.
  • Chanda Kochhar is one of India’s top bankers. But does that mean that her employer, ICICI Bank owes its chief executive officer a job no matter what, asks Andy Mukherjee in Bloomberg Quint.
  • The Hinduisation of Ambedkarism: In the Wire, Bhanwar Meghwanshi writes about how everything that Ambedkar was firmly opposed to is being used to hypocritically subvert his message.
  • Will Pop Francis cause a schism in the Catholic Church? In the New Yorker, Vinson Cunnigham reviews the book To Change the Church.
  • In the London Review of Books, Stephen W Smith writes about Winnie Mandela’s battle with South Africa’s apartheid regime.
  • Decades after physicists happened upon a stunning mathematical coincidence, researchers are getting close to understanding the link between two seemingly unrelated geometric universes, writes Kevin Hartnett in Quanta Magazine.
  • Why were economists taken completely by surprise by the 2008 Great Recession? In Prospect magazine, Howard Reed makes the case for restarting the discipline of economics anew to correct for fundamental flaws.
  • In the New York Times, Carl Zimmer writes about how the humble sweet potato colonised the world.