-
Three centuries after its publication, Gulliver’s Travels remains a sharp satire on human follies, vanities and moral depravities, reminding us that the Other helps us understand who we are, and that without the Other, there is no us
-
Conquest, colonisation, governance and politics are central to The Odyssey. The capture of households, women, slaves, mass killings and destruction make Homer’s epic a horrific tale of human hubris
-
De Gaulle made one major mistake: He dismissed students as simply being afraid of examinations rather than recognising their demand for accountability
-
If a creature does not ask for freedom, will it be free? Freedoms are demanded and fought for, but what of those who cannot do either?
-
Once a multidirectional eco-memory of trees, dogs, and other nonhumans, the road to glitzy corporate, educational, and industrial hubs in Hyderabad is now a mono-memory — dominated by humans and their wheels
-
As wars of extermination and displacement continue, we see that the justification for such acts is often shrouded in words of myth and mystery, and have been so since the ancient world
-
The victims in the Epstein Files are brutally rendered into a new form of trafficking and circulation—as documents
-
As we track who is next in the Epstein files, a wilful uncertainty marks our forced ignoring of the genocides, the wars, the shootings, the media
-
If all lifeforms have sentience and emotion, then the chance to flourish cannot belong to humans alone
-
Humanity often describes extreme violence perpetrated by humans upon each other as ‘animal rage’ or ‘animal acts’, creating a false distinction between human and animal
-
As it turns 20, Ishiguro’s ‘Never Let Me Go’ echoes Shelley: Are we not responsible for the clones, the creatures we design with the will to serve humans?
-
The interaction with AI ‘companions’ is far more immersive now, and how we deal with it will shape the precariousness of our lives
-
The 25th anniversary of England’s Kew Millennium Seed Bank gives us the opportunity to see how humanity future proofs the planet — from agriculture to culture
-
As Nobel laureate Toni Morrison said: We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal
-
John Milton’s ‘Areopagitica’, published 380 years ago, was one of the first defences of free speech and quest for truth — its arguments remain valid even today
-
Humans find robot sadness compelling because its intelligence makes it sad, just as intelligence makes us sad too
-
We read Mein Kampf in its hundredth anniversary year with the wisdom of hindsight but also horror-struck at the Israeli state’s own actions now, fully aware of the nightmare reality Hitler’s vision spread across 700 pages produced
-
There may be no poetry in the pits but poetry can bring up what lies below: fear, greed, devastation
-
The worlds of nature and humanity are not dichotomies: they inhabit and constitute each other
-
In addition to this distinction, the professor Pramod K Nayar has now moved into the global top 100 in Literary Studies
