Calcutta -The City That Refuses to DieÂ
Nowhere else in India do people engulf you as they do in Calcutta. From the moment you step off your train or plane, and begin…
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Reading The Bar Codes
“UPON MY WORD: India’s prisons are stuck in a time warp Strange how time’s machine travels back and forth at warp speed. Two hundred and…
The Opposition-The Games Old Men Play
There is an old Indian parable that says it all: six blind men feel various parts of an elephant’s anatomy, and each one extrapolates, from…
Not Selling Volumes
It was a browser’s dream come true kilometres of books that took hold of the bibliophile’s heart-strings and did not stop tugging for hours. For…
From Flood To Trickle
Large advertisements in Delhi newspapers-last fortnight announced that Mother Dairy was being forced to dilute the fat content of milk supplied to the capital’s citizens…
Mathematics Of Ragas
When Frenchman Bernard Bel and American Jim Arnold met by chance in a Delhi hotel in September 1979, it turned out to be a momentous…
Spate Of Senseless Tragedies
Qutab Minar, the 72.5-metre-high monolithic tower that Iltutmish built 750 years ago, witnessed two shocks in its hoary life-span. In 1368, it was struck by…
Sri Lanka – The Aftermath
Ganesha’s temple had never seen so many supplicants, all with unanswerable prayers Colombo’s Tamils call it Pillaiyar Kovil, and its ornamented gateway on Galle Road…