Month: July 2020

After his masters in Political Science he worked as a lecturer in Andhra University before going to United States in 1968 to study at the Martin Luther King School of

Dr Goparaju Vijayam or popularly known as Dr Vijayam, passed away, in the morning today at his home at the Atheist Center in Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh. The loss is tremendous

(A speech delivered by Dr. Vijayam at the World Humanist Congress and the World Founding Congress of Freethought at Oslo on 19 February 2012) We are meeting in Oslo on a

Is the coronavirus an expression of God’s wrath, a punishment for our sins or, as some of us believers like to think, merely another sign that He is testing us?

When it was announced in late March that Prince Charles, heir to the British throne, was well on his way to recovering from Covid-19, there was some celebration 4,000 miles away in

The World today (March 2020) is gripped with the pandemic of Corona Virus. While it began from China, currently it has gripped various countries; India is also facing the problem

There are many terrains where public health and religion cross paths, but epidemics are certainly the most bumpy. Contemporary examples include the large gatherings of people at several religious sites

“You realize,” a friend wrote to me from Kolkata earlier this year, “that, without the exalted secular ‘idea’ of India … the whole place falls apart.” India had been on

Almost four weeks have gone by since the Congress suffered its second crushing defeat at the hands of the BJP, but Rahul Gandhi, still the titular head of the party,

Babasaheb Ambedkar’s prefaces to his works were often as penetrating and incisive as the main body of the work that followed. His book, Who Were the Shudras? How they came to be

B.R. Ambedkar’s fascination with Jyotirao Phule goes beyond the fact that he considered him a guru. Ambedkar, recognising the intellectual legacy of Phule, wished to project him on to the national scene. More

Amidst the global outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, the ritualisation of mindless joy through banging of utensils, clapping one’s hearts out while screaming slogans of ‘Jai Shri Ram’ on the

Among the more obnoxious things I’ve read in the wake of Anthony Bourdain’s death is that if only he had been a man of faith, he wouldn’t have taken his own life.

“Is Vivekananda whom we know different?” that was the title of my article published in Udayam daily. The Telugu daily managed by movie producer Dasari Narayana Rao in 1985 with