CALCUTTA IS FOEVER

Thirty years ago, a dishevelled man leaned across and shouted at me in the smoke-filled, raucous Olympia bar on Calcutta’s Park Street: “Calcutta is forever!”…

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Wanted- A Big Bang Budget

These are extraordinary times and we witness extraordinary phenomena. Three weeks before the Union Budget, when finance ministers customarily crawl under their carapaces, the honourable…

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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…

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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…

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Panic Button

Reading An Account of the Great Fear, or Grande Peur, that swept across France in July and August of 1789, I was struck by the…

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