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Erich Fromm was a German thinker who wrote extensively on human condition in the modern society and on human alienation (estrangement). Human alienation manifests itself in many aspects of modern life. Overabundance of commodities and services available today have surpassed wildest of imaginations. And yet humans often feel a deep inner sense of being insatiated. A sense of loneliness and isolation continues to haunt us despite living in overpopulated cities. Human activities have created forces of unprecedented power and yet never had been that sense of helplessness as overwhelming as it is today. Technological advances have ceaselessly tried to control nature and yet we have never felt so insecure and vulnerable. Human society has created technological forces of gigantic proportions and of overwhelming capabilities and now these seem to have unleashed themselves off human control. One has very recently experienced how the death dance of an invisible virus sent the whole world in a pa...

  The other day I was idly surfing television channels when I chanced upon a Hollywood movie called “Guilty by suspicion” which depicts the McCarthyist era in early-fifties in the United States of America. The movie features Robert De Niro in the leading role of a persecuted Hollywood director. McCarthyism (after Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy, a rabid right wing anti- communist rabble rouser) represents one of the darkest eras in modern American history that saw a campaign launched and led by the government to hound and brutally suppress all political dissension by creating an atmosphere of fear about liberal, leftist viewpoint in general and communism in particular (the so called “Red Scare”). This was on the backdrop of cold war of the 1950s and the US government made every effort, including banning the US Communist Party,   to whip up anti-Soviet and anti-Communist sentiments that led to a veritable witch-hunt of Communists, communist sympathizers, liberals and indee...