Columnists

"Why not celebrate parents and not separate the holidays from dads and moms?"

"The simplicity of the generous gesture can give a joy of living to those who need it so much."

"In this century of violent violence in all parts of the world, it is almost ridiculous to ask people to be thankful, but women must continue to teach their children to be thankful... saying to appreciate the smallest thing that comes from others for free."

"Mom gives life in every way."

"Man has never proved his strength by the goods he possesses, but rather by the generous help he can bring to society."

"In education, there are almost no more immutable rules."

"If the young terrorists had a mother with a heart full of love, they would not think of making the revolution, but to build in this country that does not lack corners to exploit". Editor's note: Chronicle published in following the assassination of Quebec Minister Pierre Laporte."

"If moms know how to keep open the line that connects them to the friendship of their children, they will learn that today's young people are great!"

"Women's participation is more than words to take action."

"Humanity has its weaknesses, and woman is perhaps the weakness of man!"

"Every intelligent woman knows how to be free."

"It's not men's places that women claim, but their own place in a modern society."

"Smile to life this morning and be assured, ma'am, that this life will make you smile. The present belongs to the optimists."

"You know that there is a time to do one thing and another time to enjoy it."

"Graduate studies are not only, today, the key golden men."

"We need succession in career women's clubs. The younger generation of women helps us to be more aware of how our world is changing."

"Forget what hurt you, it's a recipe for youth, health and happiness ..."

"If children find life hard, they find that the family still has its good side."

"This society so harsh, so inhuman, it is composed of you and me... What are we doing to help the other one?"

"Funny time when most of the poor and disinherited parts of the world could live what the other party leaves on his plate ... And we continue to sing the joy, the peace, the love ... do we really believe?"

"The earth does not stop turning, because you are unhappy, as well swallowing your tears and smiling, even if the pain is still burning."

"The woman, who does not imitate her mother and her grandmother as a mother and a good wife, can only rely on her own scale of values ​​to find a life ideal that is important to her happiness."

"It is certain that in order to dialogue, one must, at the beginning, have an open mind."

"Awakening late to the pandemic, authoritarian or authoritarian-minded leaders have turned it into an opportunity both to shore up their power and to conceal their stunning ineptitude. To fail to see through their manufactured , as many in the media are doing, can only further endanger the long-term moral and political health of their societies."

"The public broadcaster's critique of the government was stinging in part because Johnson enjoys a high degree of support among Britain’s privately owned, overwhelmingly pro-Tory press. Nor does Modi, assured of craven public broadcasters, expect much criticism from the , which has been described, only semi-humorously, as veritably North Korean in its devotion to the supreme leader."

"As a writer I am more interested in describing the past accurately than in outlining the future; we need a new past if we are to make sense of our intolerable present or work to change it…"

"Writing about Kashmir was a strange and painfully isolating experience, but an absolutely crucial one. It made me see that, whether you are Indian or American, black, brown, or white, it is best not to get morally intoxicated by words like "secularism" and "liberalism" or to simply assume that you stand on the right side of history after having professed allegiance to certain ideological verities. Rather one should try to perceive the scramble for power, the clash of interests, that these resonant claims to virtue conceal; one should ask who is using words like "secularism" or "liberalism" and for what purposes…"

"Governments around the world say they're engaged in a war against the coronavirus. [...] This kill-or-die idiom is more than casual rhetorical overkill. Many governments are symbolically but very deliberately calling, in this time of fear and uncertainty, for general along military lines. This is so they can, while pointing to an insidious foreign enemy, aim their firepower against some of the most valuable institutions of domestic public life. They have been very successful so far."

"Even equality is a deeply problematic concept. It has its origins in Christianity, where it is conceived as equality before God. When you transfer that into a competitive commercial society, it becomes elusive, even deceptive. Really, the drama of the modern world is the collision between the promise of equality and the fact of structural inequality…"

"Supremacy of all stripes—racial, ethnic, national—works in insidious ways, burrowing deep inside impeccably liberal minds…"

"In addition to economic and military , wartime measures typically encourage a high degree of political, social and intellectual conformity. The general idea is that, in the face of an existential challenge from a vicious enemy, ought to cease. The media tends to become more patriotic, as do former . Such was the case in the United States during the early stages of its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, when most journalists and even Democratic politicians rallied around the Republican George W. Bush administration. The trouble is that the "war" against Covid-19 is actually not a war at all. And no one should feel obliged to sign up for it. The loss of, and separation from, loved ones, and the fear and anxiety that is devastating many lives is not an opportunity to fantasize about heroism in battle. The pandemic is, primarily, a global public health emergency; it is made potentially lethal as much by long neglected and underfunded social welfare systems as by a highly contagious virus. A plain description like this is not as stirring as a call to arms — and doesn't justify the more extreme actions governments have taken against critics during the crisis. It does, however, open up a line of inquiry that journalists ought to pursue, now as well as in the future."

"The twentieth century saw Ram on celluloid with films like Bharat Milap (1942), Ram Rajya (1943 film) andSati Sulochana (1961). Ramanand Sagar's television serial Ramayan, with Arun Govil starring as Ram, made history in the late 1980s."

"The Ramayan also happens to be part of the Mahabharata, dated between 300 BCE and 300 CE, where it is called the Ramopakhyan. When the Pandavas bemoaned their thirteen years of forest exile, Rishi Markandeya retorted by telling them how Ram suffered for fourteen years and while the Pandavas deserved their punishment for gambling away their kingdom, Ram did not deserve his fate – he was simply obesing his father."

"The Sanskrit word ‘maya’ refers to all things that can be measured. Human understanding of the world is limited, hence measurable, hence maya. To believe this maya is truth is delusion. Beyond maya, beyond human values and human judgements, beyond the current understanding of the world, is a limitless reality which makes room for everyone and everything. That reality is God."

"The Goddess is Maya, embodiment of all delusions. She is Shakti, personification of energy. She is Adi, primal, as ancient and boundless as the soul...The embodiment of Adi- Maya-Shakti – Durga is the invincible one. She is at once bride and warrior. The one establishes home, provides pleasure, produces children and offers food."

"The Tantrik approach to self-realization is different from the Vedic approach. The former looks upon the Goddess as Shakti, energy, to be experienced while the latter looks upon the Goddess as Maya, delusion, to be transcended. The former is more sensory, the latter less so."

"Though in Bengal and Orissa, some say, Alakshmi is visualized as an owl seated beside Lakshmi, Alakshmi is a secret goddess, invisible to all. The only way to see her is to have Saraswati, goddess of knowledge and good sense by your side. But Lakshmi will never let Saraswati stay in the same house as her. She will go wherever there is Saraswati and kick her out, making room for Alakshmi. Why does she do that, one wonders. But then one is told that Lakshmi is a whimsical goddess, she does not like to stay in one place too long. By kicking Saraswati out and by getting Alakshmi in, she ensures there is a fight in the house and when there is a fight, wealth invariably moves out of a house."

"The standard trope in modern historical studies seems to be that Hindu temples were destroyed not only by Muslim rulers but also by Hindu rulers as part of establishing their authority. It disregards all Hindu memory and Islamic writing that shows motivation of Muslim rulers at its core was religious, designed to replace the Hindu faith with Islam. This is aligned with Western academic anxiety at being seen as Islamophobic – no points lost if one is Hinduphobic."

"Despite their deep knowledge of Hinduism, neither Elst nor Frawley, neither Doniger nor Pollock, believe in letting go and moving on, which is the hallmark of Hindu thought, often deemed as a feminine trait. Instead, Elst and Frawley keep drawing attention to injustice done by colonisers, goading Indians to rise up and fight, a violent tendency that is the hallmark of Western thought, often deemed as a masculine trait... Elst and Frawley follow the Abrahamic mythic pattern that establishes them as ‘prophets’ leading the enslaved – colonised – Indians back to the ‘Vedic Promised Land’."

"The Ramayan, one of the most revered texts in Hinduism, tells the story of a prince called Ram. Dashrath, king of Ayodhya, had three wives but no children. So he conducted a yagna and invoked the gods who gave him a magic potion that was divided among his three queens. In time the queens gave birth to four sons. Ram was the eldest, born of the chief queen, Kaushalya, Bharat was the second born to Dasharath’s favourite queen Kaikeyi. Lakshman and Shatrughna were the twin sons of the third queen Sumitra."

"Ram's calm repose in the face of all adversity, so evident in the Ramayan, has made him worthy of veneration, adoration and worship. Ram's story has reached the masses not through erudite Sanskrit texts but through theatre song and dance performed in local languages. All of these retellings of Ramayan have their own turns and twists, their own symbolic outpouring, each one valid in their respective contexts."

"If we go for the one state solution, we are endangering ourselves as Jews twice. Once, we are endangering the Jewish majority. There is a great democratic controversy. I don't want to get into it. Carolyn writes about it. Let me speak about where we know the numbers. Israel itself, sovereign Israel, right now we're already down to a 75% Jewish majority in Israel. In 2025, we're talking about 70%. If you were to add even one million, I think there are 3 million, but if you add one million Arabs, we will either stop being Jewish, or stopping democratic. If we do not give full rights to these Palestinians we will not be democratic. If we do, we would go down to levels of a Jewish majority that is fragile."

"I never taught of book burning, no matter how they were silly, mendacious or propaganda-like because I guide myself by the principle that every book burning was just an introduction to burning (of people) at the stake."

"Behind every dish there is death, and people only close their own eyes to it."

"I believe that cuisine is the most important link between nature and culture."

"Not surprisingly, by the late 1970s and early 1980s, ExxonMobil scientists understood quite well the mechanisms of climate change and its broad implications for the oil business."

"I honestly think atheism is inconsistent with the scientific method. What I mean by that is, what is atheism? It’s a statement, a categorical statement that expresses belief in nonbelief. "I don’t believe even though I have no evidence for or against, simply I don’t believe." Period. It’s a declaration. But in science we don’t really do declarations. We say, "Okay, you can have a hypothesis, you have to have some evidence against or for that." And so an agnostic would say, look, I have no evidence for God or any kind of god (What god, first of all? The Maori gods, or the Jewish or Christian or Muslim God? Which god is that?) But on the other hand, an agnostic would acknowledge no right to make a final statement about something he or she doesn’t know about. "The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence," and all that. This positions me very much against all of the "New Atheist" guys."

"When most people think of nature, they want to look for perfection and for symmetry and balance, ... But if you really pay attention you are going to see that what actually makes nature tick are the imbalances, the imperfections, the asymmetries."

"...Our spiritual attachment to nature transcends religion, being part of our innermost nature as a thinking species in a mysterious cosmos."

"Science treads in the same footsteps of our ancestors, answering to our longing to understand where we fit in as we look up to the sky."