My Years in an Indian Prison Mary Tyler
So much is being written about political prisoners in India these days, that the layman might succumb to the temptation of focusing more on the issue…
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Reading The Bar Codes
“UPON MY WORD: India’s prisons are stuck in a time warp Strange how time’s machine travels back and forth at warp speed. Two hundred and…
Modi Unlimited
Coasting down the six-lane highway from Ahmedabad to Gandhinagar, wheels barely touching the asphalt, it is tempting to forget that you are in the India…
Delhi University-Notes Of Discord
Delhi University is one of the few in the country to possess a full-fledged faculty of music. But for years now, the Music Department has…
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…
A Battle Supreme
Titled Judiciary: Attacks and Survival, the speech had been long in coming, the speaker delayed, first by an attack of diabetes in March and then…
Mathematics Of Ragas
When Frenchman Bernard Bel and American Jim Arnold met by chance in a Delhi hotel in September 1979, it turned out to be a momentous…
Mysterious U-Turn
Although it is a blasphemous thought, it has cropped up in many a legal mind during the last few weeks: if bets were placed on…
Jagannath Mishra-Cleared By The Court
The India-Rubber man, Jagannath Mishra, had done it again. For months, the Bihar chief minister’s political fate had hung in the balance while the Supreme…
Cheating The Hangman
Convicted killers Billa and Ranga were expected to make headlines last fortnight. Make news, they certainly did, but not the way everybody anticipated. Instead of…
Hanging Fire
The Quality of justice seemed to be under tremendous strain last fortnight. At issue was the vexatious question of capital punishment. As usual, the shock…
Until Death Do Us Part
I am your valuable,/The Pure gold baby,/That melts to a shriek,/I turn and burn,/Do not think I underestimate your/great concern./Ash, ash/You poke and stir,/Flesh, bone,…
Death Penalty – Snag In The Rope
Anticlimax has become the boon companion of the Supreme Court. When the court reopened on July 18 after its summer vacation, it was shadowed by…
The Method Man
Gujarat’s Chief Minister tells Chaitanya Kalbag in a wide-ranging interview that policy and process make a heady development cocktail Narendra Modi is not a tall…
The Daisy’s Petals
Will we get a Lokpal? Will we not? The answer is blowin’ in the wind It’s a NAIL-BITER. I predicted in another column that the…
Great Stress Test
It’s good we now have a GST, but its design is another matter Since you all love acronyms for the Good and Simple Tax and…
Hollowing Out
Governments cynically scoop out value from their own companies Privatisation will work only when the government sells more than 50 per cent of a state-owned…
Sell Sell Sell
The government must take courage and embrace privatisation Two numbers speak eloquently about our schizophrenia over privatisation: the Rs 2.11 trillion ($32.5 billion) package announced…
Bhag Piyush Bhag
Can the new Railway minister outrun the challenges? Piyush Goyal is a chartered accountant, lawyer, former investment banker, former Bharatiya Janata Party treasurer, and a…
How to make more with less
Team leader Modi is fishing in a shallow talent pool How much a hurry is prime minister Narendera Modi in? It depends on your horizon.…
Glass Half-Full?
Strong, sustained growth is possible—if we don’t trip ourselves up We can hope that in the run-up to the next general election we will not…
Viral Fever
The only antidotes to fake news are truth and commonsense Start exercise your smartphone thumb, because the next big election will be fought on our…
Jaat Kahan Ho
Some day extraterrestrials will thrill to Raag Bhairavi in outer space Imagine there’s no countries / It isn’t hard to do Nothing to kill…
Red-Letter Days
Many anniversaries this year, but few happy ones This is a year of anniversaries , some unpleasant, some prescient, some momentous. CE 2019 is important…
NaMo the FMCG
Merchandise, tourism, a board game, a biopic, a web series … If you want to decompress from the 2019 election campaign, and haven’t already donned…
Off the Blocks
Get set: Campaign 2019 will rivet, horrify and confound you For the second time in five years, I was struck by how apposite Rud-yard Kipling’s…