“WE WERE ALL COWARDS!” When Anand Mohan and Chaitanya Kalbag called on Mrs. Ambika Soni in Delhi on August 17, they expected her to come forth with the defensiveness and the self-righteousness most of her colleagues in the Congress Party display. Mrs. Soni, after all, had occupied a powerful and coveted position during the Emergency—as…
Two weeks into 1977, the Ear is again put to the Ground, and monitors the subterranean noises of the Ten Approaching Bestsellers of the New Year: • PAWS: Peter Benchley will follow up The Deep with this blood-curdling story of a giant Royal Bengal Tiger that stalks the outskirts of Calcutta, gobbling up little Bengali…
“Mrs Gandhi Should disappear From The Political Scene” Jayaprakash Narayan today occupies a place in the hearts of his countrymen not unlike the one allotted to Mahatma Gandhi after Independence. How does the ailing ‘Father’ of the Second Liberation take to his new role? With his usual calm, discovered Chaitanya Kalbag and Shobha Kilachand…
Sikh love Muslim love Sikh It is difficult to judge Indian writing in English, saturated as it often is with the smells, sights and sounds of the ethos it springs from. Punjabi writing in English is a case in point. It carries strong overtones of the earthiness and directness of the people of that region.…
Authoritarianism may have professedly ended with the Emergency, but it continues to afflict many walks of our life. It has raised its ugly head, from time to time, in the country’s premier educational institutions. Young people, supposedly “tomorrow’s leaders”, are systematically subjected to stifling control, unenlightened concepts of discipline, and any protests they raise are…
Fourteen years younger than VS Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul was born in 1945 in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, and was educated in Trinidad and Oxford. He began writing in college, and his short stories were accepted for Penguin Modern Stories 4. His first novel, Fireflies, was published at the end of 1971. and his second, The Chip-Chip Gatherers,…
Nowhere else in India do people engulf you as they do in Calcutta. From the moment you step off your train or plane, and begin the ride into the city, you will be surrounded by hundreds of thousands of them. Your car or taxicab will plough into the slow crowds like some tropical icebreaker. The…
INFORMATION & BROADCASTING MINISTER L.K. ADVANI
‘I Am Not Happy with The Pattern of Newspaper Ownership’
Transindia: Mr. Advani, many people feel today that the Janata Government’s image is quite clean, and that it is innately decent, but that its performance has been quite poor. Would you comment on that?
L.K. Advani: This impression is erroneous, though if people hold that impression, I wouldn’t blame them because we came into office in a situation in which the people expect- ed wonders from us.
Transindia: Mr. Chandra Shekhar, do you think you have one of the most thankless jobs in the country today, what with having to build up a party composed of such varied components as the Janata is?
Chandra Shekhar: I agree that we have had to create a party from scratch. But I would not say that my job is thankless. There are certain advantages which one cannot ignore and there are many difficulties, too.
The Man From Malgudi It took me some time to discover Rasipuram Krishna Swami Narayan’s house. Yadavagiri, the suburb of Mysore City, where Narayan stays, is an incredibly quiet area, with long, neat streets, tree-shaded bungalows lining them. It was late afternoon, and the neighborhood was just emerging from its siesta. “R. K. Narayan?” asked…
“Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err.” – Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi Gandhi must have been passing through an extremely clairvoyant phase when he came up with this statement in the Thirties. In the thirty years that have passed since Jawaharlal Nehru was sworn in as the first Prime Minister…
CONGRESS PARTY PRESIDENT- BRAHMANANDA REDDY “We Will Return to Power Soon” Transindia: Mr. Reddy, many people feel that the Congress Party has had a great past, but does not have a great future. Would you like to comment on that? Brahmananda Reddy: That the Congress Party had a great and glorious past is accepted by…
“Going in quest there of, one of our Soldiers, a Youth, killed a Tigre-Royal; it was brought home by 30 or 40 Combies (Koonbee), the Body tied to a long Bamboo, the Tail extended…it was a Tigre of the Biggest and Noblest Kind, Five Feet in Length beside the Tail, Three and a Half in…
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 than on its human aspect. Jayaprakash Narayan’s Prison Diary, as well as that of Snehlata Reddy, for instance, have offered some glimmer of the goings—on behind India prison walls.…
This mid-December afternoon, the Ear detects the rumble of Old Man 76 gasping through his last lap, and the first stirrings of Childe 77. Here are some optimistic predictions for the twelvemonth ahead disregarding the doomsday projections of Malthusian midwives who expect 1977 to be stillborn: The Labor Party in Britain will label Margaret “Thatcher…
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s dramatic announcement on January 18 that the Emergency in India is being relaxed and that elections to the Lok Sabha will be held in March, has created ripples of amazement the world over. All detained Opposition leaders have been released, and press censorship has been lifted. What do these developments portend?…
Speaking about the 1971 elections to a Newsweek correspondent, Mrs Indira Gandhi had said: “I am the real issue in this election.” In 1977, too, it is she who is the real issue. Her challengers’ election manifestos say hardly anything new, except that they vow to ‘wipe out’ the ‘scourges’ of the Emergency. 320 million…
There had been many signs of the anti-Congress wind in the final days of the 1977 election campaign, but its magnitude amazed the canniest political forecaster. In a hurricane sweep, it snuffed out thirty years of uninterrupted Congress rule in independent India, and sent Premier Indira Gandhi, and her feared lieutenants, into sudden oblivion. The…