RT @arvindgunasekar: Tamil Nadu has always been a torchbearer of social and educational progress, pioneering some of the most transformativ….

3/3. On Independence Day 2022, the Tamil Nadu government conferred the Thagaisal Thamizhar Award on ‘Comrade RNK’ – which carried a cash prize of Rs. 10 lakhs. Typically, RNK, even while accepting the award, donated the Rs. 10 lakhs – adding another Rs. 5,000 to it – to the Chief

2/3. “Freedom movement, social reform, anti-feudal struggles—we combined these issues. That’s how we worked,” he told me when I interviewed him for my book The Last Heroes(Penguin). “We fought for better and equal wages. We fought for the abolition of untouchability. We played a

1/3. One of India’s very last living freedom fighters, R. Nallakannu, turns 100 years of age today. The CPI veteran was one of the founding members of the farmers’ movement in Tamil Nadu. Nallakannu’s struggles seamlessly integrated farmers’ battles with the anticolonial.

4/4 With Bhabani Mahato’s passing, only four of the 16 freedom fighters in my book The Last Heroes: Foot Soldiers of Indian Freedom (Penguin November 2022) now remain alive. Story link: #BhabaniMahato #FreedomFighters.

3/4 Bhabani was going by the very flawed definition of freedom fighters that we have, which largely focuses on jail time and rules out most fighters of the revolutionary underground. What Babani did in 1942-43, at the height of the Bengal famine, was to grow food, cook and feed.

2/4 Bhabani was exceptional even among the many extraordinary freedom fighters whose interviews are lodged in PARI’s Freedom Fighters gallery. She was the only one who, for hours in our conversation, strongly denied having had a role in that epic struggle. “What did I have to do.

1/4 Freedom fighter Bhabani Mahato passed away peacefully in her sleep soon after midnight of August 29-30, 2024. She was 106 years old. With her passing, the numbers of India’s freedom fighters are thinner than ever. In 3-5 years, the golden generation will be gone and not a

8/8. Nothing indicates that the marriage of the millennium had the enthusiastic approval of ‘most Indians.’ But it certainly won (or purchased) the hearts and pockets of a nauseatingly narcissistic elite. These are not just Nero’s Guests, these are Nero’s Hosts. #ambaniwedding.

7/8. Anyways, 320 million USD is just 0.27 per cent of Ambani’s wealth of 118 billion dollars. That 118 billion is 7.5 times India’s agriculture budget. And he’d have been a huge labharthi of the farm laws had those not been repealed. He and his fellow 199 Indian billionaires.

6/8. There is salivating speculation on whether The Big Fat Wedding and its prequel cost 132 or 156 – or 320 million dollars (Rs. 2,673 crore). Don’t let the suspense kill you, guys – the Ambanis will undoubtedly let us know how much it cost. Not that the Nation Wants to Know,.

5/8. Much of Indian billionaire wealth comes from publicly-owned resources either through government leases or contracts, or through privatization of public-owned assets. And with a little bit of help from their friends. With several, the rise in their fortunes neatly matches the.

4/8. ‘But it’s his hard-earned money, made through hard work’ – everyone, capitalism promises us, can be as rich as they, if you work as hard. Really? If hard work makes you a billionaire, every woman in rural India would be one. But yes, a rural household with100 days’ work on.

3/8. Sure, there’s celebration in some media. You know who India’s biggest media baron is. Those media Mukesh Ambani does not own – he’s likely the biggest advertiser. And this is the era of Editor/ Anchor as Event Manager. There may be dancing in some TV studios, and breathless.

2/8. In our decades-old ongoing agrarian crisis, lakhs of weddings in farming communities have collapsed. In one year, Maharashtra officially recorded more than 3 lakh families in just six districts with daughters whose marriages they could not afford. That was a factor in some.

1/8. Most Indians see the Big Fat Indian Wedding as a national achievement and are not put off by it, according to TV commentary, including on BBC. Really? Did BBC, anyone, do a poll/survey of most Indians? People hit the streets for what they see as a national achievement –

The image accompanying the top tweet in this thread is by Labani Jhangi and first appeared in the People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI). The image of the diary entry with tweet no. 3 is from the 1983 Random House Dictionary of the English Language.

5/5. Could we please NOT refer to our hundreds of beautiful languages as ‘vernacular’ and simply call them Indian languages where we refer to them as a group – or simply by their names Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Punjabi or any others?.#britishraj #language #psainath.

4/5. Lord Macaulay – in his February 2, 1835 Minute on English Education – famously declared that ‘a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.’.#britishraj #language #psainath.

3/5. Macaulay who could read Virgil in the original Latin, used the term in a particular old Latin sense, derived from vernaculus and verna (slave born in master’s house). To be found only in older English dictionaries. #britishraj #language #psainath