Reading Archive

When The Professors was first published in February 2006, it was greeted by cries of outrage from the academic Left. The author was denounced as a reincarnation of Joseph McCarthy and his book as a “blacklist,” although no evidence supported either claim, and both were the opposite of the truth.

The purpose of the creation of man, according to Islam, is that he should worship Allah. Allah says in the Holy Quran: َ ِلي َ َ َْ ُ ُ ْ وما لقتا نوالا سالا ِ عبدون ِّ ْ ْ َْ َ ِ لج ن َ َخَْ ُ ِ ّ And I have not created the Jinn and the men but that they may worship Me. (51:57)

“Surely, no self-respecting Marxist could have made his account rest on not just one miracle — acquiring siddhis and raining fire on to the Nalanda structures — but two, for we also have the streams of water running down from the scriptures.” – Arun Shourie

Hindu seers and sages could tap the sources of universal spirituality because they did not start with an a priori assumption of an Almighty God whom man had to fear and obey in awe and objection. Nor did they fortify this a priori assumption with a framework of deductive inferences drawn from an observed order in the workings of the outer world. They never asserted that an Almighty God had to be accepted as a matter of faith as the creator and controller of the cosmos.

We were fast asleep when the phone rang in the early hours of 26 June 1975. Subramanian Swamy, was on the line, sounding very agitated as he informed that JP, KR Malkani, and other opposition leaders had been picked up by the police earlier in the night. He then went on to say that he had to leave his house in Greater Kailash before the police came to get him. My husband, Virendra Kapoor, a journalist working for the Financial Express, asked him to come straight away to 520 Vithalbhai Patel (VP) House.

When The Professors was first published in February 2006, it was greeted by cries of outrage from the academic Left. The author was denounced as a reincarnation of Joseph McCarthy and his book as a “blacklist,” although no evidence existed to support either claim and both were the opposite of the truth.

Pandit Nehru's second book, Glimpses of World History, was first published in India in 1934 and later on in England in 1939. The second edition which was "revised and, to a considerable extent, rewritten", carried a foreword from Krishna Menon who was mainly responsible for getting it published in England. Krishna Menon says: "Glimpses of World History is no mere narrative of events, valuable as the work is in this respect, but also a reflection of the author's personality."¹

When The Professors was first published in February 2006, it was greeted by cries of outrage from the academic Left. The author was denounced as a reincarnation of Joseph McCarthy and his book as a “blacklist,” although no evidence existed to support either claim and both were the opposite of the truth.

When The Professors was first published in February 2006, it was greeted by cries of outrage from the academic Left. The author was denounced as a reincarnation of Joseph McCarthy and his book as a “blacklist,” although no evidence existed to support either claim and both were the opposite of the truth.

25th June 1975 was a sweltering day, made more uncomfortable by the frequent power breakdowns at the Indian Express office at Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg, Delhi’s Fleet Street. When the lights came on by 8 p.m., I left the office, oblivious to the fact that the blackout was just a dress rehearsal and that a coup was in the works a couple of kilometers away. The restoration of electricity was temporary—the newspaper would be in the dark for a long time to come.