Reaching There

Nadav Lapid called the movie 'The Kashmir Files' a propaganda movie while making his comments at the International Film Festival of India 2022 held in Goa last month. I'm not going to talk about the resulting controversy and eventual apology by Mr. Lapid. He was not only disrespectful of the freedom of speech of director Vivek Agnihotri but conducted his jury duty unprofessionally by taking a political stance. I'm only interested in the accusation of propaganda that Mr. Lapid so casually hurled at 'The Kashmir Files'.  The Kashmir Files What is propaganda?  The best definition that I could find is available on a website called  https://disinformation-nation.org/how-propaganda-works/ where it defines propaganda as 'an agenda' to promote a specific cause or ideology to a 'targeted audience' and a 'massaged message' which may alter or omit the facts. Propaganda can take various forms of communication to propagate the agenda.  And especially...

The debate on Times Now Summit 2022 between Salman Khurshid, Dr. Vikram Sampath, Sai Deepak, and Pavan K Varma showed how disconnected the left, right, and the middle are from each other.  We all know these 'luminaries',  as Rahul Shivshankar, Editorial Director & Editor-in-Chief  @TimesNow introduces them.  How left and right  do not apply to Indian political viewpoints  is a matter for another time, therefore pardon my use of the western paradigm of left and right for the rest of this blog post. Times Now Debate, 2022 We all know Sai Deepak through his YouTube debate with  Asaduddin Owaisi  (Sai Deepak in fact moderated the debate) a few years back. And since then he has authored a couple of books on the historical context that surrounded the drafting of the constitution of India between 1946 to 1950. His first book on India, that is Bharat forced us to rethink colonialism and introduced an entirely distinct scholarly way to look at middle-e...