Search results for ""Author Meenal Shrivastava""

As a precocious young girl, Surekha knew very little about the details of her mother Amma’s unusual past and that of Babu, her mysterious and sometimes absent father. The tense, uncertain family life created by her parents’ distant and fractious marriage and their separate ambitions informs her every action and emotion. Then one evening, in a moment of uncharacteristic transparency and vulnerability, Amma tells Surekha and her older sister Didi of the family tragedy that changed the course of her life. Finally, the daughters begin to understand the source of their mother’s deep commitment to the Indian nationalist movement and her seemingly unending willingness to sacrifice in the name of that pursuit.In this re-memory based on the published and unpublished work of Amma and Surekha, Meenal Shrivastava, Surekha’s daughter, uncovers the history of the female foot soldiers of Gandhi’s national movement in the early twentieth century. As Meenal weaves these written accounts together with archival research and family history, she gives voice and honour to the hundreds of thousands of largely forgotten or unacknowledged women who, threatened with imprisonment for treason and sedition, relentlessly and selflessly gave toward the revolution.

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The contributors to Alberta Oil and the Decline of Democracycritically assess the political peculiarities of Alberta and the impactof the government’s relationship to the oil industry on the livesof the province’s most vulnerable citizens. They also examine thepublic policy environment and the entrenchment of neoliberal politicalideology in the province. In probing the relationship between oildependency and democracy in the context of an industrialized nation,Alberta Oil and the Decline of Democracy offers a crucial testof the “oil inhibits democracy” thesis that has hithertobeen advanced in relation to oil-producing countries in the GlobalSouth. If reliance on oil production appears to undermine democraticparticipation and governance in Alberta, then what does the Albertacase suggest for the future of democracy in industrialized nations suchas the United States and Australia, which are now in the process ofexploiting their own substantial shale oil reserves? The environmentalconsequences of oil production have, for example, been the subject ofmuch attention. Little is likely to change, however, if citizens ofoil-rich countries cannot effectively intervene to influence governmentpolicy.

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