A decade ago, the triumph of liberalism in Europe was so overwhelming that even parties that traced their political lineage to the early 20th-century revolutionary working class movement did not to speak openly about the radical transformation of society. Communist parties closed down or hastily reinvented themselves as Social Democrats, while Social Democratic parties became liberal parties.
In the same newspaper, Victor Sonkin, writes on the nostalgic blogging of the Soviet years.
The sub genre of literature blogs seem especially interesting. One blog consists of short memoirs of not very distant times, which are now becoming increasingly “retro.” Before reading the website I thought that most mundane details of everyday life escaped attention, were forgotten and eventually lost. How, for example, did one pay the fare for a Moscow streetcar in 1979?
“Through the years, a man peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, tools, stars, horses, and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face.”
As a bonus, the article also gives the correct pronunciation of Borges’ name!
A repeated use of red, blue, yellow and black is a striking feature of Sawarkar’s work. Colour activates the surface of the piece, as if there was a fierce struggle between the figure and the surface grounding it. To borrow a phrase from Mikhail Bakhtin, you might even call Sawarkar’s art a “carnival of the grotesque”. He keeps returning to the fact that what we often recognise as normal — whether it is the human body or human ways of thinking — must take into account the grotesquerie that is an everyday experience for many people.(link)
Check out the gallery at his site. The paintings that I saw in his studio were very scathing, the ones at his site look relatively more tempered. One that is etched in my mind specifically is where a dalit man is carrying the village waste (night soil) on two pots hanging at the two ends of a stick, and is spitting into one of them.
The pot that he is spitting into is marked with the swastika and below it reads the word: “Om”.
a reader's words 
the first link sounds much like the crisis many indian leftists are also going thru, one of them recently talked about creating social resistance movements which would make sure that capitalism once reached does not deteriorate into barbarianism.
the second link, yeah we don’t have many 40-60 age group people blogging, do we? in India
The major change in outlook of the CPI/CPM is that they are better aligned with the INC and steadfast in their opposition to the BJP. This is in stark contrast to 1988 when they aligned with the BJP indirectly when both the Left and the BJP supported the National Front. Otherwise, the CPI has continued to decline and the CPM has stagnated. The only Left formation that has expanded is that of the Maoists.
About the age group- I am sure there are a few people around, but perhaps another reason is that the change in India has not been as stark as in the former USSR, where, for the first time in modern history, the average age of its citizens has actually declined and a mass of people have regressed into poverty.