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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The Dauphin and the Figurehead
Timing is everything, and with a number of state elections soon, leading to the general election next year, cynicism and opportunism are manifest. The Congress-led…
Desert – Greening Of Thar
Lush vegetation in the Thar? Groves jamun trees? Mighty rivers the size of the Ganga and Indus? Seasons of monsoon-like rainfall? None of this is…
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…
Gujrat – Hurricane Havoc
It was a visitation of grief and destruction, a cruel twist to the suffering Gujarat was already shrouded in. Meteorologists first noticed the brewing cyclone…
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…
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.…
Mirage In The Desert
Within a few years from now, the westernmost and thirstiest fringe of Rajasthan, along the Indo-Pakistani border, is going to be brought to life by…
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…
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…
Off the Blocks
For the second time in five years, I was struck by how apposite Rud-yard Kipling’s poem ‘If’ is in relation to Narendra Modi. At one…