Let’s debunk a myth. There is no “Nobel Prize in Economics”. On Nov 27, 1895, when Alfred Nobel signed his will, he left five prizes in alphabetical order to: chemistry, literature, peace, physics, and physiology or medicine. The Nobel Prize in Economics is declared after the Panchapandavas above.

Marx correlates the decrease of Indian textile exports with the monopoly exerted by British muslins to India and the decimation of the population of Dhaka.

In a Delhi bookshop this October, I came across Karl Marx on India. Edited by Iqbal Husain, former Professor of History at Aligarh Muslim University, and published under the aegis of Aligarh Historians Society by Tulika Books in 2006, the book attracted me too because it contained a long Introduction by the eminent Aligarh historian, Professor Irfan Habib.

“By its nature,” Marx writes in the climactic passage of a magnificent but very dense section of the Grundrisse, capital “posits a barrier to labor and value-creation in contradiction to its tendency to expand them boundlessly. And in as much as it both posits a barrier specific to itself, and on the other side equally drives over and beyond every barrier, it is the living contradiction.”

Is it possible to have a development model that can work in harmony with people and nature?

Did Maulana Bhashani—the famous Red Maulana—ever read Marx? I recently asked this question to a prominent biographer of Bhashani—Syed Abul Maksud.

No I am not talking about my encounter with the ghost of Karl Marx in Bangladesh.