Our Events

Event Details :

In recent times, India has witnessed lakhs of student protestors braving all odds to hit the streets – from Himachal to Kerala and from Pune to Assam.

Since 2014, the attack on students and higher education has been relentless.

From intensified neoliberal onslaught in terms of massive fee hikes and scraping students’ fellowships to politically-motivated appointments of incompetent administrators, Rohith Vemula’s institutional murder, saffronization of education, attempts to delegitimize students' protest by calling them anti-national, and using brazen state violence against students. This regime has been at war with its students.

Public higher education encourages debate, dissent, critical thinking, and questioning that leads to politically informed citizens aware of their social responsibilities. This is an anathema to the Hindutva Project. Additionally, we have also witnessed protests inside and outside of campuses galvanizing into wider united resistances resulting in even greater Government-backed crackdowns, both at the state and Central levels.

Neoliberalism and Hindutva offensive on higher education is fundamentally anti-student and has posed serious challenges to accessing higher education. However, students and teachers of different institutions continue to put up sustained resistance against this dual assault.

Students Won’t Be Quiet soon-to-be-published by LeftWord Books documents some of these truly inspirational and historic struggles of our time.

What should the cover of this book look like ?!

Here we call for you to imagine the cover for this book and add more colours to students’ struggles through your revolutionary art.

Submission Guidelines:

Theme(s):

• Solidarity and Unity Strengthen Our Collective Resistance
• Students Against Corporate Loot, Communal Politics, and Caste/Gender Violence
• We Are Not Defeated As Long As We Resist
• Right to Protest and Unionise
• Education for All
• United Fight Against Saffronisation and Commercialisation of Education
• Today’s Struggles are Tomorrow’s Hop
  
  

Size and resolution:

• 14.5 x 22 cm / 5.625 x 8.75 inches in JPG format (300 dpi).
• As this is book cover art, please leave space for the title and do not include additional text.
• Multiple entries are welcome.
• Send entries with contact details to winniesgv@gmail.com
• Last date for submission: 10 August 2021.

All proposals will be a part of a virtual exhibition to commemorate eighty-five years of glorious students’ struggle in India.
One of the entries will become the cover of our forthcoming book — Students Won’t Be Quiet.

Event Details :

Join Leftword Books and 1804 Books for a discussion on our recent publication, People’s Planning: Kerala, Local Democracy and Development. We will be joined by authors T.M. Thomas Isaac and Richard W. Franke, as well as Arya Rajendran, Mayor of the Thiruvananthapuram Corporation, for a discussion moderated by Subin Dennis of the Tricontinental Institute.

Speakers:

T.M. Thomas Isaac is the Minister of Finance of Kerala, an office he previously served from 2006 to 2011. Author of numerous academic papers and books, he was Professor at Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram. During his tenure as a member of the Kerala State Planning Board, he was in charge of the People’s Plan Campaign.

Richard W. Franke is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Montclair State University, Montclair, New Jersey, USA. He has written extensively on Kerala.

Arya Rajendran serves as the Mayor of the Thiruvananthapuram Corporation, the largest urban body in Kerala. She is from the Communist Party of India (Marxist). Appointed at the age of 21 she is the youngest Mayor in India.

Subin Dennis is an economist and activist based in New Delhi. Hailing from Kerala, he holds M.A. and MPhil. degrees in economics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He was active with the student movement and served as the Delhi State Vice-President of the Students’ Federation of India (SFI). Subin’s writings in English and Malayalam on issues related to economy and politics appear in various periodicals and websites. He worked with the online news portal NewsClick as a writer before joining Tricontinental.

Date: 07/08/2021
Time: 7:30 pm IST/ 10 am EDT

RSVP: https://peoplesforum.org/event/peoples-planning-kerala-local-democracy-and-development/

Event Details :

We are now witnessing the rise of a neo-fascist menace. This menace has turned its attention to left books – with attacks on left bookshops and with murders and threats of left writers and publishers. There has been an upsurge of support for these bookshops as well as for the writers and publishers. A sense of outrage has built up that shows confidence amongst our readers and comrades to confront the neo-fascists and stand up for left books.

It is in this context, of the return of left book publishing as well as the attack and defense of left books and left writers, that we propose the establishment of Red Books Day. On 21 February 2022, join us by reading the Communist Manifesto in your language. Livestream it on social media, tape it, play it on Youtube.

Red Books Day @ May Day Bookstore:

- Readings of The Communist Manifesto in Assamese, Bengali, Hindi, Malayalam, Odiya, Punjabi, Telugu, and more...

- Singing of Revolutionary songs by Dastak, Du and Janasamskriti

- Prof. Surajit Mazumdar, Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, JNU, Delhi, will speak on “The Communist Manifesto and why the text is still relevant”,

Join us on 21 February from 6 pm onwards.

For more details visit: www.redbooksday.org