Is India’s Aam Admi Party no place for intellectuals? April 23, 2015 Source: BBC / By Soutik Biswas, Delhi correspondent / Vaclav Havel, the Czech Republic’s first president after the Velvet Revolution against communist rule, once said that politics needs more intellectuals. “I hear objections,” Havel, a former dissident playwright wrote. “Politicians must be elected; people vote for those who think the way they …
Pakistan’s political leaders as heroes April 14, 2015 Source: The Express Tribune / By Shahid Javed Burki / I will begin this discourse on political leaders as heroes with some admittedly debatable observations. After years of following Pakistan’s halting development as a nation, as a political system, and as an economic entity, I have come to believe that …
Havel’s Specter: On Václav Havel April 9, 2012 Source: The Nation / By Caleb Crain / The Czech playwright’s enduring ideas about politics, truth and human nature. “A specter is haunting Eastern Europe,” the Czech playwright Václav Havel wrote in 1978, “the specter of what in the West is called ‘dissent.’” In echoing the opening salvo of the Communist …
Democracy and the Human Heart February 16, 2012 Source: The New Republic / By Paul Berman / The Village Voice gives out theater awards called the Obies (for Off-Broadway), and during the 1980s the Voice’s theater department voted to bestow one of those prizes on the distinguished absurdist Václav Havel, who dwelled in the faraway absurdistan known as the Czechoslovak …
Living in truth December 31, 2011 Source: The Economist / The unassuming man who taught, through plays and politics, how tyranny may be defied and overcome Had communists not seized power in his homeland in 1948, Vaclav Havel would have been simply a distinguished Central European intellectual. That is how, triumphantly, he ended his career. In …
Mourners in Prague Honor Havel December 23, 2011 Source: The New York Times / By Nicholas Kulish and Katerina Santurova / Mourners filled the historic St. Vitus Cathedral here on Friday and gathered outside by the thousands on a frigid December morning for the funeral Mass of the playwright, dissident and former president Vaclav Havel, an emotional outpouring of affection that largely …
Vaclav Havel, Former Czech President, Dies at 75 December 18, 2011 Source: The New York Times / By Dan Bilefsky and Jane Perlez / Vaclav Havel, the Czech writer and dissident whose eloquent dissections of Communist rule helped to destroy it in revolutions that brought down the Berlin Wall and swept Mr. Havel himself into power, died on Sunday. He was …
Havel, Still a Man of Morals and Mischief October 13, 2009 Source: The New York Times / By Alison Smale / PRAGUE — It was supposed to be an interview about the revolutions that overturned communism 20 years ago in Europe. But first, Vaclav Havel had a question. Was it true that President Obama had refused to meet the Dalai Lama in Washington? Mr. Havel is a fan …
Our Moral Footprint September 27, 2007 Source: The New York Times / By Vaclav Havel / OVER the past few years the questions have been asked ever more forcefully whether global climate changes occur in natural cycles or not, to what degree we humans contribute to them, what threats stem from them and what can be …
Vaclav Havel: from “bourgeois reactionary” to president November 29, 2003 Source: Radio Praha / By David Vaughan / Vaclav Havel was born in 1936 into a family that the communists with their love of labels used to describe as “bourgeois-reactionary”. There is certainly no denying that the family was bourgeois. For several generations they were one of the wealthiest and most …
Farewell for ‘Good Czech Who Sacrificed Himself’ February 3, 2003 Source: The New York Times / By Peter S. Green / From a snow-swept balcony in Prague Castle, President Vaclav Havel bade farewell to his fellow citizens today, bringing to an end one of the unlikeliest political fairy tales of recent times. Mr. Havel first spoke as president from that …
