A new greatest Indian (after Gandhi)
India’s Outlook news magazine has released an Independence Day special issue on the legacy of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar (1891-1956), who was recently voted by a wide margin to be the greatest Indian after Gandhi — significantly (and to many, surprisingly)…
Songs and the square
Although we last touched base with the 2011 Egyptian revolution only three months ago (see “A revolutionary/counter-revolutionary phrase book“, January 24), French broadcast services RFI and France 24 recently unveiled a remarkable web documentary on the music and musicians of…
Abstracting the particular
A graphic designer by trade, Delhi-based Sanjay Nanda is also a photographer of uncommon artistic vision. Fascinated by the interplay of colour, texture, and light, much of Nanda’s work focuses on the composition of abstract images found hiding in the…
A world of icons, not alphabets
Reviving a dead language is not normally a recommended practice in communications: road signs in Latin (say, NON DEXTER VICISSIM instead of “No Right Turn”) are certain to cause more accidents than not, and billboards written in runic Old Norse…
Before corporations were people
The protection of corporate “speech” has been a contentious subject in the United States, most recently so in the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision of 2010, in which the U.S. Supreme Court used the First Amendment to prohibit…
A revolutionary/counter-revolutionary phrase book
Almost one year on from the start of the protests that would end up toppling the regime of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, a vocabulary of dissent, revolution, and counter-revolution has evolved, with each new label carrying a mixed payload of…
