Month: September 2023

#ArcheryWorldCupFinal

Prathamesh Jawkar came agonizingly close to winning a World Cup Final gold medal, missing out by millimetres in the shoot-off.

🎥 World Archerypic.twitter.com/4i4V7pzY2t

— The Field (@thefield_in) September 10, 2023

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‘True champion on and off the court’ – Reactions as Coco Gauff wins the US Open 2023

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Ukraine on Saturday criticised the statement issued by the G20 leaders on the Russian invasion denouncing the use of force for territorial gain but refraining from direct criticism of Moscow.

“Ukraine is grateful to the partners who tried to include strong wording in the text,” said Oleg Nikolenko, a spokesperson for the Ukrainian Foreign Affairs Ministry. “At the same time, in terms of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, the Group of 20 has nothing to be proud of.”

The G20 had adopted the New Delhi Leaders’ Declaration, under which member countries committed to ensuring “strong, sustainable, balanced and inclusive growth”. While the declaration called on all states to refrain from using force to “seek territorial acquisition”, it did not specifically mention Russia in the context of the Ukraine war.

G20 adopted a final declaration. We are grateful to the partners who tried to include strong wording in the text. However, in terms of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, G20 has nothing to be proud of. This is how the main elements of the text could look to be closer to reality pic.twitter.com/qZqYluVKKS

— Oleg Nikolenko (@OlegNikolenko_) September 9, 2023

The declaration

With respect to the conflict in Ukraine, the New Delhi Declaration said that all states “must refrain from the threat or use of force to seek territorial…

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American teenager Coco Gauff came from behind to win the US Open on Saturday, clinching her first Grand Slam title with a battling win over Aryna Sabalenka of Belarus.

Gauff, 19, produced a gutsy performance in the Arthur Ashe Stadium to win 2-6, 6-3, 6-2 in 2hr 6min to complete a fairytale transformation in her season’s fortunes.

The sixth seed from Florida had gone into the final as the underdog against the hard-hitting second seed Sabalenka, who will become world No 1 in next week’s rankings.

But with both players making a slew of mistakes throughout an error-strewn final watched by a star-studded record crowd of 28,143 it was Gauff who held her nerve when it mattered to seal a deserved victory.

The win completed a remarkable turnaround for Gauff, who was left distraught after a first round exit at Wimbledon in July.

However she bounced back to win titles in Washington and Cincinnati and has now landed the biggest win of her career, after a shattering loss in her first Grand Slam final at the French Open last year.

“It means so much to me,” an elated Gauff said afterwards. “I feel like I’m a little bit in shock in this moment.

“That French Open loss (last year) was a heartbreak for me….

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This article was originally published in our weekly newsletter Slow Lane, which goes out exclusively to Scroll Members. If you would like to get perceptive pieces of reporting and analysis like this directly in your inbox every Saturday, become a Scroll Member or upgrade your membership today.

Thanks to the Narendra Modi government, our political news now unfolds like a suspense-filled OTT series.

Last week, we were hit by the surprise announcement of a special session of Parliament, followed by the appointment of a panel to examine how India can hold elections to the Lok Sabha and state assemblies simultaneously.

This week, while we were still agonising over the possibility of “one nation, one election”, an even more existential question cropped up – a G20 dinner invitation sent out in the name of “President of Bharat” set off speculation about whether the nation itself could be renamed.

In such sensational times, it is understandable that a report that reiterated a known fact – that the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party is by far the richest party in India – did not elicit major interest. Nor did an assembly bye-election in Uttar Pradesh.

But there is a reason why we should be paying attention to both.

The Modi government derives its legitimacy from the idea that Indian democracy, no matter how…

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Over the last four decades, I have taken part in countless academic seminars and literary festivals. The most recent took place last month, and was held in the southern hill town of Udhagamandalam, popularly known as Ooty. Billed as a “Conference for the Nilgiris in the Nilgiris”, it sought to envision a “bioculturally sustainable future” for this beautiful and vulnerable mountain district of Tamil Nadu. The speakers included the foremost social scientists and natural scientists who have worked in the region alongside citizen-activists, entrepreneurs, teachers, and tribal elders. In terms of diversity of participants and the quality of the presentations, this was one of the most enjoyable and educative seminars I have ever attended.

I have a personal connection to the Nilgiris. My father was born in Ooty and, as adults, my parents met and fell in love in that same town. However, I was myself born and raised at the other end of the subcontinent, in the foothills of the Garhwal Himalaya. It was in the interior hills of Garhwal that I did my first piece of sustained research. I actually first visited the Nilgiris only when I was 40. However, in the past quarter of a century, I have spent…

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As a 19-year-old conscript, Ari Folman was a soldier in the Israeli army when it invaded Lebanon in June 1982. Israel had taken its battle with the Palestinian Liberation Organisation into neighbouring Lebanon, where Palestinian fighters were sheltering. By September, despite a ceasefire, Israeli forces remained in Lebanon. Some of them were there to witness a massacre that took place that month in Sabra and the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut.

The massacre was carried out by members a Lebanese Christian right-wing party to avenge the assassination of the country’s president, Bachir Gemayel. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of civilians on the watch of an Israeli unit.

Folman had repressed memories of his deployment in Lebanon as well as the horrors of Sabra and Shatila. Waltz with Bashir is the Israeli filmmaker’s attempt to face his past. In the process, he reminds his country of its involvement with one of the worst attacks on civilians in recent history.

What makes Waltz with Bashir singular is its form. The film is an animated documentary that includes interviews with other soldiers in Folman’s unit, recreated sequences of the Lebanon War, and dream sequences. Animation proves to be a perfect choice to depict the surrealist nature of Folman’s experiences, his guilt over what…

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In 2014, the novelist Amit Chaudhuri launched a project called Literary Activism, beginning with a Symposium held in Calcutta. This movement, unique in the history of Indian letters in some respect, has tried to slowly reorient the conversation around literature toward its purported object, the “literary”’.

What exactly does the literary stand for? What distinguishes it from other modalities of thought? These are some of the questions that the subsequent symposia have tried to elaborate upon and grapple with. There is also a website, literaryactivism.com, which has published a series of essays, poems, and fiction drawn from the various contributors at the symposia.

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra has in some sense been a lifelong insurgent in the world of Indian poetry. His early years as an Indian poet writing in English were spent trying to find platforms that would take this form of writing seriously. Failing this he went on to create his own “little magazines” and founded the pioneering Clearing House publications along with the poets Arun Kolatkar, Gieve Patel, and Adil Jussawalla. This year, Literary Activism, in collaboration with Westland and Ashoka University has launched a new imprint, beginning with the publication of Mehrotra’s first collection of poems in 25 years, Book of Rahim…

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Nehru and the Spirit of India by Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee is a timely intervention at a time when India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s legacy is being contested in political and intellectual arenas. The deepest and most far-reaching of these invisible impacts is the ideological impression Nehru left on the very imagination of India as a nation. Ever since India gained independence, the RSS and the political dispensations associated with it, the Bhartiya Jan Sangh and its successor, the Bharatiya Janata Party, have always questioned the vision and idea of India that has played a dominant role in the political and cultural imaginations of the nation.

One strategy adopted by the Hindutva ideologues in their discourse is to present Nehru as a secularist and marginalise his contribution to imagining the Indian nation and nationalism. Such a strategy seems to work perhaps because the idea of secularism is associated most often with state institutions and policy, and not so much with nationalism. This assumption operates much more in the grossly oversimplified discussions in the popular public discourse, particularly when nationalism and secularism themselves are presented as being necessarily opposed to each other.

The national and the secular according to Nehru

However, the specific history of Indian nationalism in…

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