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…

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Garam hawa

India must construct an enlightened climate change policy ‘FOOD PRICES set to rise as floods ruin crops’. ‘Prime Minister promises aid to flood victims’. Does…

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Going for Gold

Seven and a half minutes into the movie Paan Singh Tomar a journalist asks the eponymous hero, played by Irrfan Khan, why he became a…

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Hello, Tomorrow

I had my epiphany on a Seoul subway in 2004. All around me, young men and women rode to work silently, mesmerised by television programmes…

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The Art of Survival

Deep inside the jungle in northernmost Mizoram, a lone man brews a tin mug of tea in the early morning haze. He is squatting on…

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Caste Abuse

It was a grim warning for all users of intemperate language, and particularly for citizens of India who continue to believe that caste bestows special…

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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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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…

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VULTURE CULTURE

PSYCHOPATHY. VOYEURISM. SADISM.  Schadenfreude. Vicarious pleasure. Blood lust. You will find several terms to describe the human tendency to find a strange satisfaction, indeed fulfilment,…

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