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…

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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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Reaping The Whirdwind

Hiteswar Saikia was last Fortnight trying to settle into the hottest seat in India-the chief ministers hip of Assam. The diminutive, balding ‘politician had been…

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The Burning Of Assam

The fuse has been burning for almost four years and the mood in the state has passed through all the faces of anger, despair and…

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A State Ravaged

It was beyond the ken of a civilised society, a blood­ spattered vindication of a heartless government’s sudden constitutional piety. The carnage began with a…

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Mizoram-A Return to Arms

Not for nothing has Mizo National Front (MNF) President Laldenga acquired a reputation for being a cool and calculating man. Towards the end of 1981,…

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CLEFT STICK

When Aung san suu kyi won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, two years after the Dalai Lama and two years before Nelson Mandela, she…

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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,…

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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…

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