Reflections

This post is by Gary Leupp. GARY LEUPP is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. This post originally was published in Counter Punch in the edition dated 14-16th October 2006. The death of Kim Jong Ill, the hereditary ruler of what is claimed to be a Communist State has made this article extremely relevant. I am grateful to Prof Leupp for permission to reproduce this piece in Reflections. The original article can be read here . "Heaven and Earth Shake with Cheers for Kim Jong-il!" North Korea as a Religious State By Gary Leupp All three countries labeled "the Axis of Evil" by President Bush in 2002 are presently religious states. Iran is of course a Shiite theocracy, while the go...

This is another post by Debashish Ray. As my readers are aware, he has been with the Indian Railways for a long time and this post muses on something that we all know about but prefer not to discuss!However do we really know? Find out!! Aww Shit By Debashish Ray My Grandmother had just passed away at Jabalpur. I was a trainee then and had managed to get to Allahabad, to try for a berth for the onward journey. All to no avail - the train to Jabalpur was heavily overbooked and there was no place. So I opted for the unreserved third class coach, which was already so packed that it was difficult to even get in. I managed to squeeze in but could only find place for one foot as there wasn’t space for the second! The train moved on with me alternating on my feet. After a couple of hours I could take it no more and even riding on the buffer seemed preferable. So off I went at the next halt to stand on the buffer housing. The other buffer was already occupied, by one of those kids who...

Driving in Malaysia is a pleasure. The highways are the best in the world and driving at 100 kmph is a breeze with wide three lane highways penetrating all over the country. Thus driving the 300 odd kilometers to Cherating took just over three and a half hours even after long halts for breakfast and coffee and once to refuel. The road travels over the Pahang hills that separate the capital from the eastern coasts. The road is spectacular, climbing high through dense forests as the exits to Bukit Tingii and Genting highlands beckon. Cherating, well known for its magnificent beaches is in the East Coast of Peninsular Malaysia. Close to Kuantan, the capital of the Pahang state, it is at the border of the Sate of Terengganu, and is part of the idyllic, typically Malay part of the country, laid back, charming and with a sense of never ending beaches, fishing villages, forests and hills. Devoutly Muslim, the people of the East Coast have for centuries traded with China, Java and the Borne...

Both these heartwarming writeups have been penned by Mr Swapan Sen . I would like to thank him for another contribution to Reflections. The Nursing Mother Cats and dogs are not known to be friends. Cats walk away if dogs are around and dogs growl at cats if they come close. Well, there are exceptions. In my house, a female street dog had once taken shelter. We used to feed her regularly and soon she became very attached to all members of our family. A year after, she gave birth to eight lovely puppies. With the passage of time most of her puppies died of disease or were run over by cars when they tried to cross the streets. One was taken away by a dog-lover and the remaining one, as it grew a little, ran away in search of food leaving the mother alone. The mother was obviously lonely, sad and used to mourn the loss of her children, lying down quietly most of the time. It was around then a kitten came from a nearby house and after moving around the lonely mother, found her quite harmles...

( Photo Courtesy: Zee News) I was returning to KL from Penang. The flight was a trifle late and I was settling down in the cab listening idly to the news in Bahasa Malaysia when I heard the name of Kolkata and then hospital and finally bomba (fire). While I am not too good in Bahasa Malaysia, I realised that there had been some fire in a hospital In Calcutta. As I reached home, my wife told me that there had been a massive fire in AMRI and the internet told us the rest. The Malaysian news channels showed us gory images as did the BBC and many others. It appears unbelievable. 91 dead; mostly patients. The sorry fact that our public buildings and disaster management services have no modern equipment or protocols was again exposed to the public eye. It is only one of a long litany of such fires: Stephen Court and the Nandaram Building are still green in our memory. Perhaps even more nauseating than the disaster is the media circus that has immediately ensued. The Media as usual have it a...

Zócalo Public Square,( http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org /)is a site that i often visit for some stimulating reading and it always provides some food for thought. They descrribe themselves int heir website as "a project of the Center for Social Cohesion, is a living magazine, an innovative blend of on-the-ground events and on-line journalism, that connects people to ideas and to each other in an open, accessible, non-partisan and broad-minded spirit. Through our web publication, lectures, panels, screenings, and conferences, Zócalo explores ideas that enhance our understanding of citizenship and community—the forces that strengthen or undermine human connectedness and social cohesion." This post is sourced fron their wesite. Written By Ken Murray,who is Clinical Assistant Professor of Family Medicine at USC, this post raises important questions about the sort of medicine that we practice. I am grateful to Zocalo Public Square for allowing me to post this on my blog. The or...

I have an unfortunate habit of uploading photographs in my blog without acknowledging the source. Frankly, in my early days of blogging, I was not even properly aware that this is unethical and in some cases illegal. However I have tried to mend my ways and these days I try to acknowledge nmy sources, whenever I reproduce an article or photograph. Unfortunately in my post The Harrier and the Moorhens I neglected to mention the sources of the photographs. This was not really intentional. I uploaded the photographs but I did not notice that the photo credits had not been uploaded. Anyway Mr Debashis Ray, who had authored this post was annoyed and rightly so. I reproduce what he had to say : Read the post on the blogspot together with the introduction by my friend. Thank you for posting the article to a larger audience. There is however one peeve. I am not sure whether Swapan Sen or you deleted the photo credits from below the photographs. These photographs were not my own but ...

The last time that we had planned the trip, Mount Merapi took a hand. It spewed out lava , initially slowly, then with increasing intensity. However we still planned to go ahead with our trip, we thought we would see both a manmade wonder and a natural wonder at the same time. But no such luck, on the morning of our trip, we found, after reaching the airport an an unearthly early hour, that all flights were cancelled. This time however the day dawned bright and cheerful, here in KL at least. In Yogyakarta it was another story. When the Air Asia flight landed in Yogyakarta, the sky was cloudy, as well it might be, the rainy season had started. But fortunately the rain held off and we lined up to get our visa on arrival. It is easy to book a car at the airport terminal itself. It is severely functional, is the terminal, but we could change our money and hire a vehicle to take us to see Prambanan and then transport us to Borobodur in the afternoon. Changing money in Indonesia is good fun....

Debashsis Ray is another friend introduced to me by Mr Swapan Sen ( see the posts here , here and here .I have not yet met him, but I plan to repair this omission the next time I am in Calcutta. He will also contribute to this blog and I am very glad to welcome him and I hope that we will have a long association. Mr Sen has written a short introduction about Mr Ray which speaks volumes about the sort of person he is, my sort of person, I would say! Here it is: One of my friends, a retired Chief Mechanical Engineer of the Railways, Mr. Debashis Ray, also sends various write-ups based on his own experience to his close friends. For quite some time I have been wondering if I may introduce him to you. He is an interesting character and a good writer of real life stories. He has a touch of subtle humor in his stories and the technical articles that he writes and sends to his friends. I met Debashis in 1969 when, as a Railway probationary officer, I went...

Lessons of a long History of Dissent: Early Twentieth Century to Occupy Wall Street by Fred Magdoff Fred Magdoff is professor emeritus of plant and soil science at the University of Vermont and adjunct professor of crop and soil science at Cornell University. He writes frequently on political economy. His most recent books are The Great Financial Crisis (written with John Bellamy Foster, Monthly Review Press, 2009) and Agriculture and Food in Crisis (edited with Brian Tokar, Monthly Review Press, 2010) and What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism: A Citizen's Guide to Capitalism and the Environment (with John Bellamy Foster, Monthly Review Press, 2011). We are at what social theorists call a "historic moment," in which real change suddenly seems possible. It is therefore all the more important to learn from past struggles. One of the first lessens of a long history of dissent from the early twentieth century to the current Occupy Wall Street movemen...

When I was a schoolboy, I, like all schoolboys dreamt of adventure. During the sixties when we were in primary school, the world did look very adventurous indeed. The space race was on, and while we did not understand the political nuances very well, the space walks, the first circumnavigation of the moon and finally the moonwalk ( of Armstrong and Aldrin, not Michel Jackson) left us with a state of wonder and a feeling that everything was possible. Three books stand out in my memory that embodied for me, the true spirit of adventure and I could and to some extent still feel a cold feeling crawling up my spine as I shared the adventures of the heroes of these books. One of them was a real person, and I refer to Jim Corbett and his “ Maneaters of Kumaon”. I was presented one copy on my birthday by one of my friends and the thrill of the forests had me in its thrall in an instant and I am glad to report, it has never left me since. The other two were fictional. One was Robert Louis St...