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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Deal Chahta Hai

A laughter club in Mumbai is forced to “zip it” because a humourless neighbour is disturbed, not long after a 63-year-old cartoon unleashes a cleansing…

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Most Powerful Women

Our Prime Minister can seem like an accidental politician. Speaking publicly, he comes across as earnestly wooden, and when he addressed the nation on September…

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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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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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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…

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