Louis Fischer and India, 1947–1964: Gandhi’s Disciple, Nehru’s Bête Noire?
This article focuses on the shift in the attitude of the liberal American journalist Louis Fischer to India. It contrasts Fischer’s admiration of Mahatma Gandhi and his support for Indian independence, expressed vociferously and prolifically in the period 1942-47, with Fischer’s criticisms and eventual opposition to the personality and foreign policy of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister. Going beyond Fischer’s reputation as a “friend of India” earned through his works on Gandhi and his efforts for Indian independence, thus far considered as the only important prisms to study his views on India, this treatment of Fischer situates his criticism of Nehru within his personal development as an anti-communist in the late 1940s and 1950s. This shift in Fischer’s attitude from Gandhi to Nehru provides an interesting personal sidelight to the intergovernmental relations between India and America in that period.
Forged in Crisis: India and the United States Since 1947
Rudra Chaudhuri's book examines a series of crises that led to far-reaching changes in India's approach to the United States, defining the contours of what is arguably the imperative relationship between America and the global South. Forged in Crisis provides a fresh interpretation of India's advance in foreign affairs under the stewardship of Prime Ministers Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and finally, Manmohan Singh. It reveals the complex and distinctive manner in which India sought to pursue at once material interests and ideas, while meticulously challenging the shakier and largely untested read- ing of 'non-alignment' palpable in most works on Indian foreign policy and international relations. From the Korean War in 1950 to the considered debate within India on sending troops to Iraq in 2003, and from the loss of territory to China and the subsequent talks on Kashmir with Pakistan in 1962-63 to the signing of a civil nuclear agreement with Washington in 2008, Chaudhuri maps Indian negotiating styles and behaviour and how these shaped and informed decisions vital to its strategic interest, in turn redefining its relationship with the United States.
FlowBrush: optical flow art
The depiction of motion in static representations has a long tradition in art and science alike. Often, motion is depicted by spatio-temporal summarizations that try to preserve as much information of the original dynamic content as possible. In our approach to depicting motion, we remove the spatial constraints and generate new content steered by the temporal changes in motion. Applying particle steering in combination with the dynamic color palette of the video content, we can create a wide range of different image styles. With recorded videos, or by live interaction with a webcam, one can influence the resulting image. We provide a set of intuitive parameters to affect the style of the result, the final image content depends on the video input. Based on a collection of results gathered from test users, we discuss example styles that can be achieved with FlowBrush. In general, our approach provides an open sandbox for creative people to generate aesthetic images from any video content they apply.