Author: Bhabani Shankar Nayak

The report of the Lancet Commission on ‘21st Century Global Threats to Health’ has identified seventeen threats to global health: air pollution, antimicrobial resistance, childhood malnutrition, the collapse of development and health assistance and aid, conventional conflicts, high alcohol use, high blood pressure, income inequality, low educational attainment, the malicious use of AI, nuclear conflict, obesity, pandemics, poor mental health, smoking, and unhealthy aging. These are threats to health and life on earth. The malicious use of AI and nuclear conflict carry the potential for catastrophic extinction of the idea of life and planet. Social, political and economic conditions produce…

The technological automation led by Artificial Intelligence (AI) is growing on an unprecedented scale unknown in world history, immersing individuals and societies across countries and threatening both the environment and individuals with its negative impacts. It destroys millions of jobs, and human beings and their skills are replaced by robots (dead labour or commoditised human creativity). Technology invades every aspect of human life, where individuals do not have basic choices in life i.e. right to privacy. Therefore, there is growing resistance to AI-led automation, often branded as a “Luddite Renaissance,” which demands banning bots and technology and slowing AI down…

The lineages of AI, from the Turing Test to OpenAI’s GPT-5, Anthropic’s Opus 4.6, Microsoft’s MAI-1 (Thinking 1), Alibaba’s Qwen, and Google’s Gemma, are flooding the new frontiers of AI development with multi-agent teams and workflows that solve complex problems while upholding the rent-seeking market of AI companies and their platform-capitalist system, which is deepening a culture worse than techno-feudalism at the cost of labour and labourers. Digital medievalism and its brutal, profit-driven AI regimes are not an option for human happiness and progress. All technologies, and the input and output models of AI and all its generative designs, are…

Capitalism is a barbaric and unforgiving system, especially toward the working people and the planet on whose shoulders it stands, exploiting human beings and nature alike. Yet, with the help of the state and government, it designs policies and processes that help to socialise the crisis, forgiving corporations when they fail to repay their borrowings due to insolvency or bankruptcy. Insolvency is a financial situation which triggers legal process of discharging debts that cannot be repaid by the debtor. From Lehman Brothers in the US during the 2008 crisis, to Mr Subhash Chandra’s Rs 22,006-crore debt being written down to…

Nestled in the county of Cambridgeshire, the historic city of Cambridge is bisected by the River Cam and defined by its eponymous university. Yet, beneath the dreaming spires and academic prestige lies a starkly divided municipality in eastern England—Cambridge is one of the most economically unequal cities in Britain. The railway line, a casual traveller’s marker, serves as a brutal socioeconomic scar, demarcating the impoverished north and east from the affluent enclaves that lie opposite. This entrenched class divide, far from being a modern anomaly, has long nurtured a vibrant, albeit fragmented, communist movement in the city that persists in…

William Shakespeare’s pastoral comedy As You Like It—specifically Jaques’ melancholic monologue in Act II, Scene VII, which conceptualises the seven stages of human life—defines the realities of world with the following famous lines: “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women are merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts.” Yet this metaphor takes on a literal and deceptive translation in politics, where leaders speak and gesture with spectacular theatricality, delivering moralising speeches on principles designed to capture mass attention and arouse mass emotion. Their aim is…

Plagiarism is the highest form of academic misconduct and the lowest level of academic practice; it undermines integrity in the processes of knowledge production and dissemination. It destroys the conditions necessary for the growth of integrity and critical scholarship that questions dominant narratives of power during the processes of learning and teaching within and outside the classroom. All forms of plagiarism are academic and professional stigmas. However, some forms are not a form of academic dishonesty. Inadvertent plagiarism takes place accidentally, under work pressure, due to a lack of academic training, or owing to a lack of awareness about plagiarism…

The rise of racism, xenophobia, anti-migrant rallies, flag-waving reactionary nationalist groups taking to the streets to claim ‘Britain is for British people, Europe for Europeans, and America for Americans (white people only)’, alongside other reactionary politics, is no longer a fringe phenomenon confined to isolated streets or remote areas. These racist and reactionary groups are influencing mainstream political parties, prompting an illiberal turn in their everyday political, economic, and electoral propaganda, as well as in policymaking during governance. The Western world, which once took pride in its scientific advancements, Renaissance, economic prosperity, democratic governance, and human rights, is now backsliding…

Human beings and their societies established universities and institutions of higher learning to challenge orthodox knowledge, advance new discoveries, and overcome the pressing challenges of their time. Social, economic, and political necessities, along with human curiosity, formed the foundations upon which these centers of higher learning were built. They were designed to produce knowledge and skills tailored to the specific needs of their people, places, and historical contexts. The production of new, secular, and scientific knowledge has frequently challenged both ruling and non-ruling elites. It has called into question reactionary traditional and religious values and exposed the blind beliefs prevalent…

“Why do you not dress like a teacher, lecturer, or professor?” asked a well-meaning, innocent colleague who liked to dress up properly for different occasions. She asserted herself further by saying, “Dressing does not reduce your commie praxis. Stop dressing like a drug addict”. The reply was simple: a teacher must dress like his students and the majority of staff members on campus. Any other form of dressing—beyond mere coverage of nudity and the representation of a professorial or organisational position—would become a marker of identity, signalling power and privilege in a space where most students struggle to pay their…