Unapologetic and unrepentant he remained till the end. His destruction of peaceful societies justified at the altar of his deep commitment to his warmongering policies, his bizarre humor on display even when bombing innocent civilians. The documentary record shows him laughing through the Paris Peace Talks, through the Christmas Bombings of North Vietnam that he ordered to force Hanoi back to the negotiating table. The same peace agreement that he accepted in January 1973 was on offer earlier. In the end, he prolonged the Vietnam War.
Full Text PDFThe author writes that Tharman Shanmugaratnam’s landslide victory in the presidential election in September 2023 suggests that Singaporeans are less interested in their president’s former political affiliations than in how well he can ensure the future of a tiny island city-state in an increasingly unstable world. Latif adds that the future cannot but be a multiracial one. Tharman’s ethnicity, he explains, did not propel him to victory. It was the absence of ethnically-based political choices among the majority Chinese that did so.
Full Text PDFThe author, a specialist in disaster management in North East India, writes that Sikkim should now concentrate on the efficient handling of the already constructed and commissioned hydropower projects instead of venturing into new ones. There should be proper human coordination and Early Warning System in place to manage the functional dams. The inefficiency and lack of human coordination to handle current flash floods in the upper Teesta catchment has badly exposed Sikkim. A small mistake upstream will have a tremendous human and environmental impact downstream. Sikkim needs to evolve a comprehensive regional hydropower policy in view of its unique regional environment, ecological setup, and geography.
Full Text PDFASEAN’s absence, both from certain new global formations and from key United Nations groups, raises questions about the role the regional organization is playing. The author also suggests that the time has come to reboot India-ASEAN relations in the interest of both sides, in order to stay relevant.
Full Text PDFAfter the Fall of Saigon in 1975, Communist Vietnamese film critics in the newly unified Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV) widely cited the 1972 South Vietnamese film, The Faceless Lover, as an example of neo-colonialist psychological warfare. In response to their critiques, this paper raises several questions: What role did the state play in constructing Southern Vietnamese war cinema? If the Communist film critics’ suggestions are inaccurate, how can we account for the emotion-laden pathos of the film? Using Vietnamese-language archival resources, the essay argues that the critical and commercial success of The Faceless Lover results from the rise of privatized cinema supported by cinema policy renewals in the early 1970s and mainstream reception of melodrama during the Second Republic of Vietnam, instead of serving any neo-imperialist agenda. Informed by melodrama theory, this essay argues that the film’s melodrama mode and ambiguous anti-war semiotics constitute an undercurrent of nationalism. It systematically rejects postwar Communist critics’ arguments while expanding the South Vietnamese film industry’s historical agents and contemporary scholars’ more objective and nuanced perspectives. This study is significant because it nuances the relationship between state apparatuses and the production of a national cinema unique to nations whose “land, government and cultural imaginary” have been divided by Cold War politics of Vietnam. The special issue addressed in this paper regarding Vietnamese cinema concerns its lack of film studies scholarship on the cinema of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) after 1975, which stems from a systematic erasure of RVN films under the Communist SRV.
The Self-Help Groups of Arunachal Pradesh are a new experiment of recent origin. While numerous studies have been conducted on women’s empowerment in the context of the role of SHGs across India, the topic is under-studied as it relates to Arunachal. This case study of SHGs illustrates the comprehensive development of women occurring on multiple fronts, alongside the challenges they encounter. They are an informal association of individuals, predominantly comprising women, who mutually uplift each other socially, politically and economically. To put it into perspective, among 131 countries, India ranks 120th in female labor force participation rates, while the incidence of gender-based violence remains unacceptably high. This paper, largely based on primary data collected during a field study carried out in 2021, aims to understand how SHGs impact tribal women economically and how these groups help raise their economic awareness. It studies the National Rural Livelihoods Mission (NRLM), a poverty alleviation initiative of the government of India launched in 2011 that strives to mobilize impoverished rural households into SHGs to enhance their capacities to manage and enhance their livelihoods, as well as the Arunachal Pradesh State Rural Livelihoods Mission (ArSRLM), an autonomous body that serves as the nodal agency for implementing the central government’s NRLM/Aajeevika schemes in the state. The present study improves our understanding of the extent to which the NRLM’s philosophy is mirrored in one of the rural societies of Arunachal Pradesh.
Full Text PDFThis article is the second part of a series on the botanical incubation of tea plantations in South Asia. While the first article illustrated the early imagination and blueprints created by botanists to establish a tea industry in South Asia, the second article concentrates on how those botanical “business plans” were realized in the mid-nineteenth century. Botanists launched the first migrations of tea plants and prepared ecological habitats for tea through research on climate, soil, and ecology. Botanical gardens in India and Ceylon provided indispensable botanical and technical support for early planters with seeds, plants, and knowledge, extending the outreach of the global tea production chain to South Asia. This saga is illustrated by the stories of “amateur capitalists” who devised and incubated the tea industry with the help of the botanical infrastructure in Calcutta, Saharanpur, Peradeniya, and Hakgalla. Those pioneers were a number of botanists and naturalists such as Joseph Banks, Robert Kyd, George Govan, John Forbes Royle, Hugh Falconer, Nathaniel Wallich, and their Ceylon counterparts H.T. Normansell and G.H.K. Thwaites. The story of tea manifested in the multi-species universalism of plants, animals, people, and knowledge, as well as the cosmopolitan connections among academic and commercial establishments beyond artificial borders and identities.
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