The Dutch Suicide

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Children in Holland do not put their finger in a dike to save their town anymore but talk about the land of death. This March a Dutch girl at a school in Enschede, committed suicide. Enschede is a city in the northeastern province of Overijssel on the German border. And the suicide and the town would have probably gone unnoticed if not for some friends of the girl. All of them were taking part in a game of suicide. The report first came out in a newspaper in Holland. All these girls, 12 to 15 year olds were texting each other in a game of dare, urging each other to commit suicide through their cellphones and on the internet. The vicious cycle of this suicide game was broken when one of the girls who was being egged on to commit suicide got scared and informed her parents. The panic spread....

Searching Mr Sankrityayan

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This blog is about a (re)meeting with Rahul Sankrityayan. Mr Sankrityayan was a widely travelled scholar and a Marxist theoretician. Only book, written by him, that I have read is a translation, "A journey from the Volga to the Ganga". It's a briliant fictional account of migration from the steppes of Eurasia to the Indian subcontinent. It starts around 6000 BC and stretches till 1942, the year Gandhi gives a call for the Quit India movement. It's bit strange to suddenly write about him. But probably, it's also not entirely odd. Recently I was reading a book called, " 25 Communist Freedom Fighters". It has a chapter on Rahul Sankrityayan. It also mentioned on how Mr Sankrityayan was expelled from the CPI(M) and how after an apology he was brought back. But not surprising, given utterly strange degrees of freedom the CPIM excercises when it comes to expulsions.....