…says Bhagwati, feels it is a fallacy to think our farmers would be swamped by global competition; wants India to be ready for freer trade in farm sector They Call economies a dismal science, but it need not be so when Dr Jagdish Bhagwati discusses it. The Columbia professor, who has long been a frontrunner…
It is like being thrown about in an ideological cocktail shaker. You get off a gleaming passenger jet and drive over a soaring expressway to the 227-year-old Writers’ Buildings in Kolkata to meet a very capitalist communist politician. West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee says there is no place for jobless growth, and now that…
We’re a long way from solving Britain’s race riddle Quite a few of my trips to London have been shadowed by death, or the portent of death. On September 11, 2001, I was about to board a non-stop flight to London from Singapore when my phone rang. My daughter in California said, “It looks like…
India’s economy is barrelling along at a growth rate of over 9 per cent, savings rates are up, investments are up, more jobs are being created, and inflation appears to be under control. So have we hit our stride? Have we chanced upon the right development model for the huge, tumultuous democracy that we are?…
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 that sound like a recent edition of the Hindustan Times? Wait a minute. These headlines are from a British newspaper. A week ago, I was walking through a huge tropical…
The Civil service still remain a big draw Fresh out of South Africa, Mohandas Gandhi made a particularly strong speech in Benares in February He was gloomy about Indians earning the right to self-governance. He said a British member of the “much-abused” Indian Civil Service (ICS) had asked him to put in a good word…
“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 fifty-one years ago, Siraj-ud-Daulah demonstrated what an overcrowded prison can do to human beings with the Black Hole of Calcutta. “Figure to yourself, my friend, if possible, the situation of…
The old city is giving way to a new bright-eyed metropolis Thirty years ago, a dishevelled man leaned across and shouted at me in the smoke-filled, raucous Olympia bar on Calcutta’s Park Street: “Calcutta is forever!” Outside, Ambassador taxis were inching along the flooded street. The electricity would go the moment you hung up your…
The utter oddity of 21st century India still dancing to the tune of caste With this kind of rebellious example, how will fair play and righteousness prevail? Won’t the lower castes get out of hand? In this decadent age, common men follow the right paths out of fear if that were destroyed, where could we…
Senior Editor of this newspaper were about to sit down for their evening news-planning meeting when the smoke alarms started jangling. Within moments the first floor newsrooms filled with thick billowing smoke. Journalist for both the Hindustan Times and its sister Hindi newspaper, Hindustan, began to file out and down the stairs There was no…
Hindustan Times on Saturday was launched on June 3 last year. It was a unique product and an unqualified success. Unique, because no other newspaper published a bespoke Saturday edition. Unqualified, because readers have been lured to it in huge numbers, and have stayed for the weekend. HT on Saturday acknowledges the 21st-century urban Indian…
I experienced my epiphany about consumer media a couple of years ago on a Tokyo subway. When I lived in Japan in the mid-1990s, commuters would be bent earnestly over their little pulp paper backs or Manga comics. Now, just over a decade later, everyone’s fingers are flying over buttons on little machines that are…