The Don of Dhanbad
Dhanbad’s dreaded Mafia gangs were riveting topics of conversation last fortnight, and for different reasons. Film actor Shatrughan Sinha, with the blessings of the ruling…
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WILL THE EUPHORIA REMAIN ?
Gandhi must have been passing through an extremely clairvoyant phase when he came up with this statement in the Thirties. In the thirty years that…
TARAPUR – CLOSE TO SHUTDOWN?
“I have said that we will never take to nuclear weapons even if this country is going to be destroyed in the absence of (such…
Earthy Tales
Last week I was on a flight to Mumbai About two hours in, the captain announced that there was unseasonal heavy rain ahead and it…
Bihar Press Bill-Battle Cry
Whatever else the government is butter-fingered at doing, it is adept at keeping the results of its impetuosity in a state of continuing suspense’. The…
Faith, Hope And No Charity
The International Year of Disabled Persons (IYDP) began with a bang: the National Federation of the Blind led its members in a vociferous agitation in…
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…
For Whom The Bill Tolls
One of the misconceptions spawned by the Bihar Press Bill is that it will emasculate Bihar’s journalists. The truth is that Bihar’s journalists have already…
Interview: Anil Agarwal
“Everybody is going to die, but I am going to die last.” He started out as a scrap trader in Patna. Today, with a personal…
Scrabbling Away From the Abyss
Nitish Kumar’s victory in last month’s Bihar election celebrates the triumph of economics over feudalism, but the climb out of poverty will be steep and…
TOILET -TRAINING INDIA
On September 25, the day Prime Minister Narendra Modi received the Gates Foundation’s Global Goalkeepers Award in New York for his leadership of the Swachh…
KILLING ME SOFTLY
He took a deep breath of air. Once again he caught a strangeness on the wind, neither pleasant nor unpleasant, neither odour nor perfume—just strange,…
APOCALYPSE NOW
Kanpur, Faridabad, Varanasi, Gaya, Patna, Delhi, Lucknow, Agra, Muzaffarpur. Nine of the world’s ten most polluted cities listed by the World Health Organization are in…
SUFFER THE CHILDREN
The other day, I watched this video of four-year-old Jackson Drew reciting Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 (Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?) and marvelled…
THE AIR IS THICK
The Good news is that both the Bharatiya Janata Party and Congress seem to have finally woken up to the looming catastrophe of air pollution…