Governor’s Disgrace
EIGHTEEN hours after Haryana Governor Ganapatrao Devji Tapase committed the most undemocratic faux pas in India’s political history, he was cowering on a sofa in…
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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…
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…
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…
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,…
Labour – Making a Point
Rarely had an event invited such determined and concerted action by Union Government: When the 24-hour national strike called by the National Campaign Committee (NCC)…
Prisoners – Fighting for A Cause
The salaried middle classes have time and again fallen prey to the Government’s more capricious economic decisions. But, one group that has suffered the most…
The Bhajan Bludgeon
The Sprawling city that Charles-Edouard le Corbusier had designed for bureaucrats and retired people looked like an army encampment girding up for an enemy onslaught.…
Lok Dal-Taken For A Ride
No point of no return was so final as the one Charan Singh and Devi Lal reached on July 21. The crusty Jat leaders have…
Bihar – 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…
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…