-The Hindu   With her passing, Indian feminism has lost one of its earliest icons Three years ago, almost to the day, when we launched Vina Mazumdar's memoir, Memories of a Rolling Stone, the room at the Habitat Centre in Delhi was packed to overflowing. Resplendent in her beautiful silk, Vinadi, as she was known to everyone around her, smiled her way through the evening as bureaucrats, academics, politicians, educationists, feminists and others...

-The Hindu Vina Mazumdar, doyenne of the Indian women's movement, architect of the epochal Report of the Committee on the Status of Women in India in post independent India, passed away in a central Delhi hospital on May 30 after a brief illness. In the introduction to her memoirs published by Zubaan in 2010, she described herself as a "women's activist", a "feminist,", a "trouble-maker", but the one she liked best was...

-The Indian Express A team of physicists from IIT-Delhi is conducting a five-day workshop to teach the subject to madrasa instructors in Taleemabad, near Jamia Hamdard. Speaking to a class of 30 madrasa instructors-turned-students, Vipin Tripathi, Dr Sanat Mohanty and Dr Pawan Kumar began their workshop by talking about bridges. The earnest maulanas, from Delhi and Faridabad, participate enthusiastically, as they are asked to figure out why a corrugated sheet makes...

-The Hindu   An open letter from Madhav Gadgil says Kasturirangan panel report will rob the region of its biodiversity Dear Dr. K. Kasturirangan, J.B.S. Haldane, the celebrated 19th-century scientist and humanist who quit England protesting its imperialistic invasion of Suez to become an Indian citizen, once said: "Reality is not only stranger than we suppose, but stranger than we CAN suppose!" I could never have imagined that you would be party to a...

-Countercurrents.org   The events of last over two decades have shown us, more than before that the efforts of dividing the nation by communal forces have been a major obstacle to social peace and process of development. In India while the communal violence began with the Jabalpur riot of 1961, it is from last couple of decades especially from 1980s that the divisive politics has tried to drive a wedge between different...