[Reader-list] Xavier's principal takes on Sena and his own student (Rohinton Mistry's book banning row)

[Prem Chandavarkar]

I was in Berlin a little over a month ago.  In the square at Humboldt
University in the heart of Berlin there is a monument to an event in May
1933 when Nazi students dragged hundreds of books, that they considered
subversive and damaging to German culture, out of the university library and
burnt them.  The monument is an unobtrusive inset of a glass square in the
middle of the plaza, and if you look down through the glass you see nothing
but empty bookshelves.

But the most powerful part (to me) was a plaque containing a statement by
the German writer/journalist/poet Heinrich Heine, prophetically stated in
1820, which says "This is only a prelude; where they burn books they
eventually burn people"

On 12 October 2010 19:47, TaraPrakash <taraprakash at gmail.com> wrote:

> Well appeasement is part of Indian politics and universities are just part
> of it. We have to ban the sale of books like Satanic Verses and Lajja let
> alone include them in any syllabus.
>
>