EGO Magazine: Economy & Politics Archives

Inner Sanctum
Bollywood
Queer

Fiction
Diaspora(s)
Urdu & Hindi Poetry

about

Human Rights Film Festival - NY Now in its 21st year, the 2010 Human Rights Watch Film Festival—the world’s foremost showcase for films with a distinctive human rights theme—creates a forum for courageous individuals on both sides of the lens to empower audiences with the knowledge that personal commitment can make a difference. View	Teach For India Only 61 per cent of India's population is literate (2001 Census). Teach for India (formed under the aegis of Teach for All incubated as a seprate entity within Teach For America) is rising to the ocassion. In 2009, Rakesh Mani traded his job with JP Morgan in New York for his own classroom in a challenging Mumbai school. View
Forget Islam Sareeta Amrute tries to make sense of, to find closure after the Mumbai attacks. By putting aside the question of religion, we might begin to make sense of this carnage in Mumbai in a way that unites rather than divides, in a way that looks beyond ideologies towards a common set of complaints and constraints on life that affect people across the subcontinent. View	Repeal of India’s Sodomy Law Drafted by Lord Macaulay in 1860, Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code—India’s sodomy law criminalizes ‘carnal intercourse against the order of nature’. The law has been called ‘archaic and brutal,’ ‘the colonial era monstrosity'. In 2000, the Law Commission of India concluded that it should be repealed. View
The Second World Parag Khanna's recently published book The Second World is a bold look at geopolitics in the 21st century. "The reason I focus on the second world in my book is that these are societies/countries with more subtle mechanisms at work, where it’s not simply a matter of selling out to the highest bidder”. EGO highly recommends The Second World. View	Modern-Day Slavery "There are more slaves today than at any point in human history" asserts author and journalist Benjamin Skinner. Even low-end Justice Department figures estimate that there are about 50,000 people languishing in hidden bondage. Ben talks to EGO about his book, “A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery” View
Poet of the East ...“Poet of the East,” which befits his efforts to transform modern India and Islam from helpless fatalism and spiritual apathy toward renewed cultural vigour and social progress". A short essay on the architect of modern India and Islam, Muhammad Iqbal, by Randeep Purewall View	Whale Country A short personal essay by V.V. Ganeshananthan on family history and Sri Lanka: "A Tamil boy, not yet my father, was born in a village in the Tamil town of Jaffna, Ceylon, in 1944. Everything in the village looked beautiful to him then: it was peaceful, full of coconut and palmyra trees, and not far from the sea." View
Secularizing India "The poet’s coffin floats in the mosque’s shadow. The world bears witness to the funeral, the janaazah of Urdu. This is the closing of the film Muhaafiz (‘In Custody’). Randeep Purewall and Kulwindar Singh Parhar explore the dilution of India's secular identity in this second of a three part essay series. View	Whither India It is said that the past defines the present, and the present defines the future. Randeep Purewall and Kulwindar Singh explore the dangers of Hindu Nationalism and its impact on India's social fabric and its historical secular identity. View