The Big Squeeze
Turkmenistan’s “President for Life” Saparmurat Niyazov erected a 50-ft gold-plated statue of himself in the centre of the capital Ashgabat, eight years before he gave…
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New Business Families
“If a thousand suns were to rise in the heavens at the same time, the blaze of their light would resemble a little the supreme…
Friend in Need
The Rashtriya Swyamsewak Sangh (RSS) is everybody’s favourite bugbear. So perhaps it was inevitable that it would be accused of having a hand in the…
An Heir Splitting Legacy
The story is as complicated as the whorls on a fingerprint, a ready-made screen-play bursting with grandeur, feudalism, pretension, and the tattered remnants of pomp…
Loser Take All
Our history of Karnataka-style perfidy goes back a long way The wise ones among us are all ganit shastris(Mathematicians) and love crunching our election results…
Jaat Kahan Ho
Some day extraterrestrials will thrill to Raag Bhairavi in outer space Imagine there’s no countries / It isn’t hard to do Nothing to kill…
Waterless World
How melting Himalayan glaciers and Chennai’s dry taps are connected Time was when ‘Glacial Speed’ used to mean ‘very, very slowly’. That has changed forever.…