Dear home: Letters from an NRB Parliamentarians and Pedagogues : the cartoon and its missed ironies By Dev Nath Pathak  editor’s note: this column appearing on a Monday instead of its usual place on Saturday. Apologies to our regular readers! The contemporary history of Indian parliament is rife with Socratic ironies. It delivers a message to contradict itself. And it is in this context that the relation between Parliamentarians and pedagogues become a contested entity. On the evening of May 13, 2012, when the parliamentarians gathered to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of Indian... 

Sharifuddin Shariq: the only MP with guts to oppose withdrawal of Ambedkar cartoon!   New Delhi: what is the merit in the argument that a cartoon from Class XI textbooks hurt the sentiments of the Dalits and showed dalit leader B R Ambedkar in bad taste? None, to be precise. You can keep staring at it in amusement for hours and yet the alleged disrespect never shows up. What does come to the surface is a certain feeling of intimacy and warmth for a past that many children may find dry and remote without the illustration and the timely joke. Why the Human Resources Development Minister...