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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Political Compulsion

Two experts on Soviet studies, both lecturers in major universities, were informed late last month by the University Grants Commission (UGC) that their applications for…

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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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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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