Shiv Visvanathan, asian

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About the AuthorShiv Visvanathan

The writer is a member of Compost Heap, a group of academics and activists working on alternative imaginations.

Climate change. (Photo: Pixabay)

Of science, Gandhi and climate change

Climate change provides a moral challenge to India to create new experiments, to read nature and industry.

1 Dec 2018 1:14 AM IST

An angry crowd shout slogans as they sit by bodies of victims of the train accident in Amritsar on Friday. (Photo: AP)

Amritsar shows us our moral vacuum

The tragedy of Amritsar is that we can get away with the story that no one was responsible in a causal sense.

27 Oct 2018 1:13 AM IST

Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)

Notes for a Gandhian peace movement

The challenge we have to propose for ourselves is how do we reinvent a peace movement for our time.

8 Oct 2018 6:08 AM IST

LGBTQ community members celebrate after the Supreme Court verdict which decriminalises consensual gay sex, in Mumbai. (Photo: PTI)

After 377, opening up to a new imagination

The five-judge bench in the Navtej Singh Johar case did just that: it decriminalised homosexuality in India.

18 Sept 2018 12:04 AM IST

Scientists have spent years trying to work out what makes a relationship tick, and what make them work. (Photo: Pixabay)

New notions of freedom, adultery needed

As women struggled and society changed, law had to respond, but often the response was still archaic.

26 Aug 2018 6:24 AM IST

Liberal arts do not begin with diktats and syllabi, but with storytelling. The return of storytelling is the first attempt to redeem education. Storytelling creates memory, returns orality to its place in society. (Photo: Pixabay)

Why the liberal arts are crucial

Orality links up to memory. Our street performances emphasise memory and the constant reinvention of memory.

2 Aug 2018 8:22 AM IST

Kamal Haasan and Rajinikanth

An emerging wave of environmental politics

The politics of environment and the battles for livelihood become a microcosm for the democratic struggles today.

6 July 2018 12:33 AM IST

PDP leader Mehbooba Mufti. (Photo: File)

We need to think about Kashmir in a new way

US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un are seedy characters, yet even they seem desperate for...

26 Jun 2018 12:53 AM IST

DNA tests conducted further revealed that she had been sexually violated after her death and charged Alexander, a 37-year-old worker at the morgue as the offender. (Representational Image)

Power of Lists: Men, women & new consent rules

Somehow one senses that the everyday nuance of feminist struggle has not penetrated the younger generation.

14 April 2018 5:53 AM IST

Actors Rajinikanth and Kamal Haasan during a meeting in Chennai. (Photo: Asian Age)

3 anchors of democracy have lost their power

Science provides a generalised model of truth, objectivity, fairness and the need for rituals of experiment to verify...

12 March 2018 12:30 AM IST

Prime Minister Narendra Modi

Three crises in a search of a narrative

Three crises haunted 2017 and we lack even a discourse, a language for dialogue.

24 Jan 2018 1:29 AM IST

A Rohingya refugee girl looks next to newly arrived refugees who fled to Bangladesh from Myanmar in Ukhiya. (Photo: AFP)

The year of the missing: Where's our humanity?

All genocidal intent in India's new policy is a clerical act of reclassification and the Rohingya go missing.

4 Jan 2018 2:58 AM IST