Articles by Vithal Rajan
We found 48 results.
Kamala and Joe [Satire]
Vithal Rajan – TRANSCEND Media Service,
23 Nov 2020
‘Kamala, now that we have a moment to ourselves, let me offer you my own personal congratulations for a glorious victory! The victory is as much your doing.’ ‘No, Joe, no! You are too modest! The Glory is all yours!’
→ read full articleRomantic Peregrinations Searching Peace Activism
Vithal Rajan – TRANSCEND Media Service,
1 Jul 2019
‘Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh! ‘We Know Who’s Gonna Win!’ – In the 1960s it was most heartening for me to see a small ragged group of young Canadians standing outside the US embassy in Ottawa chanting this slogan, much hated by the American military. Brought up by idealistic parents, I had emigrated to Canada to enter what I thought was ‘the modern world,’ away from feudalistic practices, caste oppression, and gross insensitivity towards women. However, I was shocked to see on TV every evening American war planes bombing the life out of helpless Vietnamese peasants 30,000 feet below.
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Specially Organised Retreat for TRANSCEND and Galtung-Institut Members in Nilgiris Hills, South India
Prof. Vithal Rajan – TRANSCEND Media Service,
24 Sep 2018
If you are going to the IPRA Conference in India in November 2018, here is an opportunity to include a stay at a Bed&Breakfast Retreat in the green and peaceful Nilgiris Hills of South India. Vithal Rajan, a TRANSCEND and Galtung-Institut member and an old friend of Johan Galtung, will help organise your stay on concessional terms, and guide your visits to nearby historic and cultural places, and wildlife reserves in Tamilnadu, Kerala, Pondicherry and Karnataka states of India.
→ read full articleSpecially Organised Retreat for TRANSCEND and Galtung-Institut Members in Nilgiris Hills, South India
Vithal Rajan – TRANSCEND Media Service,
4 Jun 2018
Vithal Rajan, a TRANSCEND and Galtung-Institut member and an old friend of Johan Galtung, will help organise your stay on concessional terms, and guide your visits to nearby historic and cultural places, and wildlife reserves in Tamilnadu, Kerala, Pondicherry and Karnataka states of India.
→ read full articleIndia’s Brexit Moment
Vithal Rajan – TRANSCEND Media Service,
22 May 2017
22 May 2017 – Sashi Tharoor has done a pretty thorough job of debunking the pretentions put forward by journalist-historians, like Niall Ferguson, that the Raj conferred several benefits on India and other colonies. However, what is yet to be written about is the destructive stranglehold imperial memories continue to have on the guardians of Whitehall and of the South Block in Delhi. As Macauley predicted we share a language, a set of laws, a form of governance, and a passion for cricket.
→ read full articleCrime and Punishment in Syria
Vithal Rajan – TRANSCEND Media Service,
17 Apr 2017
Why then are the Western powers, led by America, so certain that Assad is the culprit? Criminal investigation experts inform us that all criminals have a distinctive modus operandi, a criminal signature, by which their agency is recognized. Just as Nikki Haley held up a photo of children dying of gas attack to initial America’s direct military engagement in Syria, way back in 2003 Secretary of State Colin Powell held up a tube of anthrax in the Security Council meeting to assert Saddam Hussain had weapons of mass destruction.
→ read full articlePeaceful Protest as True Nationalism
Vithal Rajan – TRANSCEND Media Service,
13 Mar 2017
By 1917, a hundred years ago, millions of men had already been killed in war-torn Europe, and hundreds of French villages and towns destroyed. When the war ended in November 1918, the Allies were almost on the point of surrendering but Germany succumbed first. Field-Marshall Foch called the Treaty of Versailles an ‘armistice,’ and so it proved, for another global war came within twenty years claiming several million more lives.
→ read full articleWhy Do People Revolt?
Vithal Rajan – TRANSCEND Media Service,
6 Feb 2017
India experienced two unprecedented and totally unexpected, mostly leaderless mass uprisings of the middleclass in the recent past. The latest, the so-called ‘jallikattu’ protest of the students of Tamil Nadu has just ended. The previous one was nominally led by Anna Hazare, a Gandhian ex-serviceman, and roused the people of Delhi and its environs against rampant and open corruption in government circles.
→ read full articleLove and Economics
Vithal Rajan – TRANSCEND Media Service,
30 Jan 2017
A common definition of money is that it is a store of value. But human beings value many things, principles, attitudes, beliefs, emotions, which are incommensurable. Some of the most basic human actions fall into this category – a mother’s love, a teacher’s guiding hand, a friend’s support, or even one’s own sense of beauty or duty.
→ read full articleIndia Fails the Leprosy Test
Vithal Rajan – TRANSCEND Media Service,
30 Jan 2017
The World Health Organization reported that in 2015 India accounted for 212,000, or 60%, of all the new cases of leprosy worldwide. As the WHO has pointed out, medicines and treatments are available to eradicate this ancient dreadful disease, but political will has been lacking for a very long time.
→ read full articleJallikattu and Humanity’s Petty Ethics
Vithal Rajan – TRANSCEND Media Service,
23 Jan 2017
North Indians have been amazed at the 75-million strong Tamil reaction to the ban on ‘jallikattu,’ a harvest event in which village young men try to snatch the purse of money tied to the horns of a trained bull… In such an elite atmosphere it was easy and natural in Delhi circles to believe that dark-skinned poor Tamil farmers would be cruel to their bulls during jallikattu.
→ read full articleIn Memoriam
Vithal Rajan – TRANSCEND Media Service,
16 Jan 2017
Dr. Hanumantha Rao’s unique gift was his discovery of the ‘Four Waters’ system for providing sustainable agricultural livelihoods to the majority of Indian and third world small and marginal farmers subsisting on dry rain-fed lands. His idea has the simplicity of genius.
→ read full articleThe Political Shakespeare
Vithal Rajan – TRANSCEND Media Service,
2 Jan 2017
26 Dec 2016 – These last three years have been dedicated to the Bard. Dramatic political change was in the air when Shakespeare lived and wrote. The great humanist sensed these changes and mirrored them in his plays for us to make of them what we will.
→ read full articleThe High Road of India and the Low Road of China
Vithal Rajan – TRANSCEND Media Service,
26 Dec 2016
Can the differences between the developmental histories of the two Asian giants have been caused on the one hand by the Indian bourgeoisie being continually empowered, while on the other Mao Zedong attempted to empower the Chinese masses for two short decades?
→ read full articleThe Modern Destruction of Ancient Aleppo
Vithal Rajan – TRANSCEND Media Service,
19 Dec 2016
17 Dec 2016 – If the English poet, John William Burgon, called Petra ‘half as old as time,’ Aleppo is a lot older. One of the world’s earliest cities, it ended the bronze age by discovering iron ore. A centre of Christianity almost two-thousand years ago, Aleppo sent evangelists as far afield as the western shores of India.
→ read full articleIndia: Terrorism, Elections, Corruption
Vithal Rajan – TRANSCEND Media Service,
21 Nov 2016
When the British left India in 1947 the country was clean of any corruption. The bitter truth is that it was allowed to infect the system starting to rot from the top, first under Nehru, who was too romantic to notice the machinations of his satraps. His daughter made corruption a part of political policy. All political parties and leaders have happily followed suit since buying the votes of poor people is far easier than delivering development.
→ read full articleRupture, Loss and Living: Minority Women Speak About Post-Conflict Life
Vithal Rajan – TRANSCEND Media Service,
14 Nov 2016
This reviewer discovered another message as he closed the book. Though he had shared the same time-space as the authors, he had not been aware of the delicacy with which women could unravel the tragic aspects of the human condition through the living narratives of other women, which could only be read through eyes blurred with tears.
→ read full articleNo Trumps to Diplomacy
Vithal Rajan – TRANSCEND Media Service,
14 Nov 2016
After the death of Julius Caesar, the conqueror, Augustus, the first Emperor, concentrated all power in his hands ending Rome’s democratic traditions. Tiberius corrupted the system further. Caligula took Rome deeper into cruelty and destruction. Nero’s buffoonery signaled the long cynical decline of all social values till Rome ceased to be the centre of the Western world. A curious parallel exists today in the history of the American empire.
→ read full articleThe Fog of Empire
Vithal Rajan – TRANSCEND Media Service,
18 May 2015
Surprising win for Cameron with greater mandate
Right-wing ideology dominates discourse in Britain
Who Is Responsible for Indian Farmer Suicides?
Vithal Rajan – TRANSCEND Media Service,
11 May 2015
The present spate of farmer suicides in India unquestionably fall in the ‘anomie’ category, linked to moral confusion caused by economic ruin, failed aspirations and crushing disappointment. Many have gambled with their lives and fortunes, and put themselves and their families under tremendous risk by thoughtless borrowing to get out of their families age-old poverty trap.
→ read full articleQuit Bamming Us, Obama!
Dr. Vithal Rajan – TRANSCEND Media Service,
26 Jan 2015
On India’s Republic Day, Jan 26 2015, Barack Obama will be in Delhi. What is his agenda? As America’s salesman-in-chief he needs to get rid of inventories of defence material, nuclear technology, and other build-ups hurting profit. He will return from India half satisfied with what he achieves, but he has never aimed, nor has been permitted to aim, for much more.
→ read full articleA Noble Surprise
Vithal Rajan, Ph.D. – TRANSCEND Media Service,
20 Oct 2014
Despite the twinning of Pakistan and India by the Nobel Committee, peace between the two countries will remain as illusory as their hope that Obama, America’s first black president, will be more peaceful than the other warlords who have shown their patriotism by bombing hapless people around the world.
→ read full articleThe Love Jihad Nightmare
Vithal Rajan, Ph.D. – TRANSCEND Media Service,
13 Oct 2014
Islamophobia is creating anger among Muslims in many nations, anomie in minority pockets, and breeding irrational hatred in a few.
→ read full articleThe Scots Back Off
Vithal Rajan – TRANSCEND Media Service,
29 Sep 2014
If the Scots had not backed off they might have helped the English to break away from their imperial past and start living in the present as Europeans. Unfortunately [they] kept the English psychologically locked into a dysfunctional past, losing them a key role in the shaping of new Europe, and making them nothing but a subservient de facto colony of the USA.
→ read full articleHow Did The British Get An Empire?
Vithal Rajan – TRANSCEND Media Service,
29 Sep 2014
It makes perfect sense then that the sepoys, from the ‘untouchable’ or lower castes, discriminated against by a caste-ridden society, gravitated to a service that treated them honourably. They fought for their own honour, and created an empire for foreigners from kingdoms that gave them little respect or social opportunity.
→ read full articleJohan Galtung: Pioneer of Peace Research – Edited by Dietrich Fischer
Dr. Vithal Rajan – Bangla Times,
7 Oct 2013
Professor Fischer is a long-standing friend and colleague of Johan Galtung, the widely acknowledged ‘father of peace research.’ In this new book, he brings together a collection of 16 key essays by Galtung; a voluminous Galtung bibliography, listing 165 books written between 1953 and 2012; and a detailed introduction to the life, beliefs, and writings of Galtung.
→ read full articlePreparing for COP III
Vithal Rajan – TRANSCEND Media Service,
29 Oct 2012
If scam-ridden governments of third world countries, like India, continue their environmentally destructive polices in the real interests of their own ruling elites, the leaders of the West, and their corporate movers and shakers deliberately collude in the process of creating regional instability and concomitant dependency on themselves.
→ read full articleHow to Acquire an Underclass While Doing Good
Vithal Rajan – TRANSCEND Media Serivce,
5 Mar 2012
Winston Churchill once famously declared that the British Empire was acquired in a fit of absence of mind. Most probably he was right.
→ read full articleThe Beltway Mob
Vithal Rajan – TRANSCEND Media Service,
10 Oct 2011
The Beltway Mob is kept good company in the present-day by two of their staunchest allies – though they are mutual enemies – by the Pakistan military who in the name of a merciful and beneficent God exports terror abroad and imports oppression at home, and the Indian political class who though descended from humble, hardworking, and austere Gandhians are among the most rapacious whores in power today.
→ read full articleThe Concept of Strategic Depth: Can the Compass Move?
Vithal Rajan – TRANSCEND Media Service,
15 Nov 2010
Military planners in Pakistan have landed themselves in an existential mess by backing their American allies a few decades ago to convert free-living tribals into the Taliban. They took this dangerous step to help create strategic depth in Afghanistan against any Indian offensive.
→ read full article‘Peace hath her Victories…’
Vithal Rajan – TRANSCEND Media Service,
25 Oct 2010
Since the beginning of the Vietnam War, several academic institutions and civil society groups have focused on creating the new discipline of Peace Studies, with varying degrees of clarity, in some places reflecting the urgencies of ‘conflict resolution,’ in others, the needs of communities to arrive at reconciliation.
→ read full articleThe Kashmir Imbroglio: Thinking the Unthinkable
Vithal Rajan – TRANSCEND Media Service,
18 Oct 2010
Back in the bad old days of the Cold War, the heaviest of the backroom hawks of the Pentagon, Herman Kahn, coined the phrase ‘thinking the unthinkable,’ meaning strategies for wiping out the Soviet Union with nukes. Luckily for all of us, Ronald Reagan had a better idea, the same result could be achieved by an undeclared economic war and arms race that would force the communists to scratch themselves out of the tournament.
→ read full articleDogs, Migrants, and Daughters-in-Law
Vithal Rajan – TRANSCEND Media Service,
11 Oct 2010
In my experience of seventy years, daughters-in-law in India get a shabby deal. Suffering, misunderstanding, lack of trust and affection are all everyday features in their lives. Many get badly abused for not bringing in enough dowry, or are constantly threatened for being not well read, or too well read, for being backward or being modern, for being ugly or for being too pretty – the list is endless. Physical torture is also added to routine mental torture. Too many are killed so that their husbands can marry richer women, or just because everyone in the in-laws’ house is tired of them.
→ read full article‘Raj Rule OK’ in Independent India
Vithal Rajan – TRANSCEND Media Service,
4 Oct 2010
Every Indian political party has devised its own unique selling point. The Congress as the mother of all parties distributes patronage and sucks into its vortex corrupt floods of black money. A pattern that others of course follow but with variations. The BJP as the strongest contender for power is risen as the Hindu answer to the Taliban, while the communist parties are home to lost causes. In Tamil Nadu, the southernmost and arguably the best run state, power is divided between two parties, heirs to the great anti-upper-caste, anti-establishment movement of a hundred years ago.
→ read full articleThe Un-Disappeared Orientalist Gaze
Vithal Rajan – TRANSCEND Media Service,
30 Aug 2010
Ramanujan’s life was enclosed within the theory of numbers, not only loved by pure mathematicians for its sheer beauty, as believed by Hardy, who lived within the privileged cloisters of Cambridge, but as the recently-held International Congress of Mathematicians proclaimed in Hyderabad, it is intimately involved in several practical applications, and even in elucidating the very nature of the Universe.
→ read full articleKILLING TRIBAL AND TIGER TOGETHER
Vithal Rajan – TRANSCEND Media Service,
5 Apr 2010
Tribal and Tiger killed out of SightLike their Forests burnt down at Night… [with apologies to William Blake] The world is witnessing the last great act of a global tragedy that will end not in victory for any one side, but in the defeat of all. And today, all of us are guilty. The world’s […]
→ read full articleRE-VISITING GANDHI’S IDEAL OF TRUSTEESHIP
Vithal Rajan - TRANSCEND Media Service,
26 Mar 2010
A great hobby with literate Indians is following their statistics on growth. However much rents and fuel prices may go up, however unaffordable vegetables and milk may get, they feel cheered with good news about growth statistics. Particularly heartwarming is news that since a year ago Indian billionaires have doubled in number with 50 on […]
→ read full articleCROSS-GARTERED BY HISTORY
Vithal Rajan,
17 Mar 2010
“It’s a blow job! I mean – ‘Blow Me Down!’ It’s after all a foreign language, more like a dead language, not that it was wasn’t spoken all round and all over the world when I was growing up, but round me it was almost always spoken wrong, if there is such a thing as […]
→ read full articleTRANSCRIPT OF A SECRET MEETING BETWEEN AMERICANS AND CUBANS RECENTLY, SOMEWHERE IN HYDERABAD, INDIA
Vithal Rajan,
27 Feb 2010
US Senator: I think I speak for both of us in expressing thanks to our friends in Hyderabad India for facilitating this confidential consultation. It’s the first of its kind between both our countries, and I sure am glad the Press is nowhere in sight. Cuban Rep: That’s the way you wanted it and we […]
→ read full articleA CHRISTMAS STORY
Vithal Rajan,
20 Dec 2009
The First Lady enters the room her eyebrows lifted in a question. “I have made camp beds in the Oval Office for the girls,” she says, “but I don’t understand why they can’t sleep in their own beds on Christmas Eve.” Leon Panetta, Director of the CIA, speaks quietly. “Madam, America faces the gravest threat […]
→ read full articleHORSES FOR COURSES
Vithal Rajan,
21 May 2009
The largest democracy in the world has just finished a month-long voting process in which over 415 million voters, out of a total electoral list of 715 million, cast their votes to bring back the hoary Indian National Congress to power. The electoral system was inherited from the Westminster ‘first past the post’ British model, […]
→ read full articleMILLIONAIRES IN SLUMS
Vithal Rajan,
17 Feb 2009
At the end of February 2009, the outcome of two events dominate the minds of the Indian middleclass, though both to any rational person would appear trivial and of no consequence. The first is the question whether Slumdog Millionaire, after sweeping the Golden Globes and the Bafta Awards, would secure Oscars for India. It doesn’t […]
→ read full articleWHY TALK OF GLOBAL GOVERNANCE WHEN THERE IS NO GLOBAL JUSTICE?
Vithal Rajan,
21 Jan 2009
Management chatterati have made it fashionable for governments and universities to set up centres of global governance, abandoning any attempt to rectify glaring injustices at a global level. A small section of humanity over consumes, over pollutes, over wastes – and adding injury to insult – over bombs the vast sea of the poor, who […]
→ read full articleWHEN SHALL WE HAVE THE BIG BANG?
Vithal Rajan,
9 Jan 2009
The cosmologist’s concept of the Big Bang is old hat for Hindus, who have believed for millennia that is how the Universe is born, and will perish, a concept beyond all limits of human morality, for as the Rig Veda says, ‘It was born before the Gods themselves, who knows why, or whence It came?’ […]
→ read full articleDIREST SENTENCE FOR A TERRORIST
Vithal Rajan,
1 Jan 2009
The attack by a group of terrorists on the city of Mumbai for several terrible days in the end of November has been called India’s 9/11, and most middleclass Indians are calling for very strong action by the Indian Government. I am one of them. The question remains what action would break the mould, and […]
→ read full articlePIRATES OF THE EMPIRE
Vithal Rajan,
27 Dec 2008
‘Pirates!’ have formed a popular, even affectionate, theme in British pantomimes, which usually are performed with good-humored laughter around Christmas time. Captain Hook is as much a favourite with children as is Peter Pan. All this is culturally understandable if we remember that piracy, as practiced by Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh, started this ‘fog-grit’ […]
→ read full articleTHE NATIVES CONTINUE TO BE RESTLESS
Vithal Rajan,
18 Dec 2008
From Hyderabad, India ‘The natives are restless tonight,’ was a stock phrase used in colonial adventure yarns to signify an impending revolt. The sahibs loaded their guns and awaited the night attack. The noise outside the compound could have been a mysterious religious ceremony or just fun, they didn’t care, they knew little about the […]
→ read full articleTERRORISM: THE ONGOING ATTACK IN MUMBAI
Vithal Rajan,
2 Dec 2008
December 1, 2008 Friends, In the last 24 hours I have received three messages: from Mr. Mazher Hussain condemning the attack on behalf of COVA; a denunciation of this latest terrorist attack from Mr. Ali Asghar of Roshan Vikas; and a political demand from Peace, a Hyderabadi Muslim-led group, for greater Muslim participation in the political process. […]
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