by Badri Raina

[Collected here are some of Badri's poems]

January 17, 2010

For Jyoti Basu

As I write, you seem set
To bid adieu—
Your life’s work more than done.
We would be truly greedy
To ask more of you.

What man walked so straight
And for so long
With a single thought in mind—
To do what you could
For fellow men and women

At the end of the line.
You solved what you could solve;
Neither birth nor accomplishment
Vitiated that simple resolve.

Your stern, Spartan selflessness
Made no song and dance;
No sophisticated twist of theory
Stymied your advance.

[Originally published in The Hindu October 25, 2009]

by Badri Raina
first published in The Hindu November 7, 2008

VIJAY PRASHAD’S new book, The Darker Nations, is history enumerated not just by a scholar but by an anguished participant in the destiny of the world’s oppressed who scrutinises the collapse of a promising world-idea in order to understand better how new ways may be found to resurrect a humanist order.

by Badri Raina
first published in the Mainstream Weekly, September 3, 2008

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark;
O cursed spite
That ever I was born to set it right.
(Hamlet)

In an act of conspicuous courage (some might say ‘audacity’) the young, bright, and fiercely upright Omar Abdullah has breached the pall of silence in which the Valley has remained suffocated since the coerced exodus of the Pandits in 1990.

In a statement recorded on his blog, Omar has made the following candid aversions that interrogate Kashmiri Muslims as a whole:

by Badri Raina
First published in People's Democracy, September 30, 2007

Epigraph

“I am one of the unemployed, but if I was in India, I
would say the same thing that Mr Gandhi is saying.”

(A Lancashire mill worker to Gandhi, 1931)

by Badri Raina
first published on June 1, 2007

by Badri Raina
first published May 22, 2007

India's ruling think gurus are forever on the lookout for a smart panacea for what they perceive the country's ills. In arguing for a two-party political system, the idea seems to be to subdue the proliferation of organic discontent among the lower orders of the polity by imposing a mechanical structural arrangement from the top.

by Badri Raina
first published in Mainstream Weekly, November 22, 2005

I t is now obvious that the neo-imperialists in America—and their apologists at home here—wish to hard sell the thesis that the Westphalian bedrock (sovereign nation-states, and the principle of non-interference), upon which international relations have been based for over two centuries, must be deemed to have slipped with finality from under the countries of the world.

First Published in "People's Democracy", the weekly organ of the CPI(M) August 29, 2004, vol. XXVIII, no. 35.

by Badri Raina
first published in the Hindu, August 1, 2003