By Chuppala Nagesh Bhushan ♦️India's Twin Mass Movements, Born A Year Apart, Show How Religious Revivalism Can Take Very Different Routes To Influence. ♦️What a Century of Unregistered Mass Movements Reveals About Accountability in South Asia In 1925, in the central Indian city of Nagpur, a doctor named Keshav Baliram Hedgewar gathered a handful of young men for callisthenics, drills and discussions of Hindu civilisation. A year later and a few hundred miles north, in the dusty Mewat region, a cleric named Muhammad Ilyas Kandhlawi began urging lapsed Muslims to relearn the basics of their faith. Neither man could have predicted that his small initiative would grow into one of the world's largest religious or cultural movements. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Tablighi Jamaat now claim, by some estimates, tens of millions of adherents between them, the RSS concentrated in India and the Tablighi Jamaat spread across some 150 countries. Comparing them is a useful ...
Peter Thiel's flight to Argentina is really a hedge, not an exit ANY visitor to Barrio Parque, the hushed embassy district of Buenos Aires where ambassadors and old cattle money have long kept their townhouses, will now find a new neighbour. Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, an early backer of Facebook and one of the Republican Party's most generous donors, has paid around $12m for a 17,200-square-foot mansion designed by Alejandro Bustillo, the architect behind some of Argentina's grandest 20th-century buildings. His children have been enrolled in local schools. His husband has relocated with him. President Javier Milei has hosted him at the Casa Rosada, and Mr Thiel has held separate meetings with the economy minister and the deregulation minister. Naturally, this has been read as a billionaire's flight from America. It is nothing of the sort. While Mr Thiel's body has moved south, his money has stayed resolutely north. In the same quarter that...