THG Recom. 15: Gujarat is relegating the Muslims not to second class but to fifth class
Plus the Chinese people's search for some dignity, a short film and a podcast on how degraded reading is degrading our civilization
Let’s start this week with this poignant Newslaundry interview with Mallika Sarabhai
Highlights from the interview:
India in general may be trying to relegate its Muslim population to second class status but in the home turf of Prime Minister Modi and Home Minister Shah, they are already fifth class citizens. That speaks volumes about the duo’s attempt to export the Gujarat model to other states of India
Gujarat saw communal ritos prior to 2002. But then they were mostly the affair among the extremist fringe on both sides. Not so this time. The respectable middle class people in 2002 not only drove their SUVs to loot the Muslim shops but bothered to call their friends when they found something valuable that could not be carried in one car.
The repressed manhood of Gujarat exploded in the form of gory rape-murders. As the Hindu men scoured the Muslim houses and localities and commited horrible crimes, their womenfolk cheered.
Some more bad news from India this week: after the founders of NDTV, Radhika and Prannoy Roy resigned as the directors of RRPR Holding Private Limited, the legendary journalist Ravish Kumar quit the channel yesterday. This is one more step towards the Hungary-ization of Indian media as I’ve written earlier:
China
I hope you are aware of the protests that swept Chinese cities a few days ago. Among the videos to come out of the protest, I found this one fascinating because the protesters here connect the dots between the Xinjiang fire and the Guizhou bus crash that killed 27 people being (?forcibly) taken to the quarantine center:
For an intimate portrayal of the protests that took place in Beijing last Sunday night, please listen to this podcast from NYT:
What It’s Like Inside One of China’s Protests
For more context of the protests:
For those of you who newly subscribed to THG, I also cross-posted last week this urgent piece by Bill McKibben:
Here is one more must-read from McKibben:
Short film for the week:
Clip of the week
Finally, here is one podcast you cannot afford to miss explaining how the degradation in humankind’s reading is degrading our civilization:
This Conversation About the 'Reading Mind' Is a Gift
…in Wolfe’s view, our era of information overload represents a historical inflection point where our ability to read — truly, deeply read, not just scan or scroll — hangs in the balance.
We discuss why reading is a fundamentally “unnatural” act, how scanning and scrolling differ from “deep reading,” why it’s not accurate to say that “reading” is just one thing, how our brains process information differently when we’re reading on a Kindle or a laptop as opposed to a physical book, how exposure to such an abundance of information is rewiring our brains and reshaping our society, how to rediscover the lost art of reading books deeply, what Wolf recommends to those of us who struggle against digital distractions, what parents can do to to protect their children’s attention, how Wolf’s theory of a “biliterate brain” may save our species’ ability to deeply process language and information and more.