“You don’t have to be a ‘sting journalist’ to spy on somebody. Camera photographs and video are now ubiquitous, We never know who is recording what we are saying. Every email we send is ‘discoverable’ and we should be prepared to see anything we wrote splashed across a blog or a chatroom.” The audacious hacking…
Where responsibility for troubled histories can be clearly defined, other countries have tried to make amends. Germany has apologised for the horrors of the Holocaust… How far can you reach back in time if you want to right wrongs, real or perceived? Look back through history and nearly every nation can point to traumatic events…
To be truly remembered in history books, Narendra Modi will have to parlay his interpersonal skill to work his way through his bucket list I don’t know how many people noticed this tweet from the Prime Minister’s Office on November 19: “External Affairs Minister@ Sushma Swaraj ji is present at Delhi airport to receive PM…
I am nagged by a disturbing question: how will historians compile the “collected works of Narendra Modi” when so many of his thoughts are so, well, instant? What better setting to join Instagram than Nay Pyi Taw, Myanmar’s new capital, back-dropped by visuals of spectacular pagodas, with thousands of swooning followers now able to follow…
The two men were born fourteen years and fourteen days apart. They died fourteen years apart, one just three years after independence. Vallabhbhai Patel and Jawaharlal Nehru were both London-educated lawyers. They both worked very closely with Mahatma Gandhi in the long fight for independence. Both went to prison several times. Both were involved in…
Five years ago the Centennial Group and the Asian Development Bank issued an interesting report titled “India 2039: An Affluent Society”. There is a lot to read there; the Congress party had just been re-elected, and it seemed to have been handed a decisive second chance that would enable it to get out of the…
When our prime minister rode on horseback to the Vaishno Devi shrine in Jammu last week, one swooning supporter could not contain himself and tweeted: “When I saw Modi on a white horse on way Maa Vaishno Devi the avatara of Kaliki (sic) flashed my mind. What a leadership”. Devout Hindus believe that we are…
I was chatting with my barber in Gurgaon when I realised that Narendra Modi and the hundreds of other politicians campaigning in the Haryana and Maharashtra assembly elections were not uttering the P word. Salman, the young hair-cutter, said he was the second of nine children of a sepoy in the Indian Army — the…
Thousands of grumpy bureaucrats are being forced to sacrifice a long weekend — there are too many of them anyway this year in India — and clean toilets on Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday as Prime Minister Narendra Modi launches his Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (Clean India Movement) by wielding a broom himself in a Delhi slum on…
Twice in the past four months, Narendra Modi has spoken with unalloyed pride and excitement as he stood among our super-achieving space scientists — at Sriharikota on June 30, and on Wednesday when the Indian Space Research Organisation celebrated the success of our Mars orbiter Mangalyaan. “History has been created today You have dared to…
Narendra Modi is a follower of Yogi Adityanath. On Twitter, that is. But the Mahant from Gorakhpur has no qualms about setting a tone that neither Modi nor his senior colleagues can publicly take. Why, while Modi basks in the afterglow of a series of foreign-policy successes, the yogi has seen fit to broadcast his…
Or how much telecom spectrum? Or iron ore? Or how many ports and airports? How many zeros must be added to a long string before a billionaire is sated? In Leo Tolstoy’s riveting 1886 short story “How much land does a man need?” a poor Russian peasant named Pahom vows to own some land after…
It is amusing, and not entirely surprising, that anybody sounding less than flattering of the Narendra Modi government is instantly suspected to be a member of a left-liberal pseudo-secular club of automated naysayers. There is, too, a newer class of dissidents, consisting either of frustrated right-wingers dismayed at either not partaking of the loaves and…
We are hopefully in the last of this summer’s dog days, and Sirius (or Svana as it is known in Hindu astrology) will glow a little less brilliantly in the hot night sky. Dog days are said to induce all sorts of mental upheaval, agitation, and unpleasantness. Perhaps that is why much of Europe wisely…
This weekend Prime Minister Narendra Modi will travel to Nepal on his third foreign trip in ten weeks. By the end of September he will also have taken in Japan and the United States. Looming large on his itinerary will be China, which he visited four times as Gujarat’s chief minister in his quest for…
Somewhere, through the unbearable din of television and anti-social media this week, I saw one tweet that plaintively asked why we were hearing so much from everybody but not enough from Narendra Modi at the BRICS summit in Brazil. Our prime minister met the leaders of China, Russia, Brazil and South Africa, but coverage back…
When a little girl named Topsy is asked in Uncle Tom’s Cabin if she knew who made her, she says, “I expect I grow’d.” Today, Arun Jaitley will declare financial independence when he unveils Budget 2014 without the Planning Commission (PC) breathing down his neck. True, the Budget drafters in the Prime Minister’s Office and…
Our members of parliament sowed the wind in the 15th Lok Sabha and are reaping the whirlwind in the 16th Lok Sabha. The last Lok Sabha worked only for 61% of its scheduled time, the worst in the past half-century. The Bharatiya Janata Party was in very aggressive opposition to the United Progressive Alliance. There…
To begin with, Modi is under microscopic watch and Deng never was. Modi has a good majority in the lower house of Parliament, but that does not mean lawmakers will blindly rubber-stamp his legislative efforts. If you do the arithmetic the National Democratic Alliance stands little chance of a majority in the Rajya Sabha, even…
One of my prized possessions is a fossilised limpet, a kind of sea snail that attaches itself very, very tightly to rocks. The fossil must be hundreds of thousands of years old. It must have been prised off a rock with some force, the kind that is trying to get many of our privileged leaders…
There is a new sense of purposefulness in government. Many of the early steps Modi has taken reflect his Chief Executive Officer style in Gujarat. He does not believe in endless meetings and buck-passing. It seemed like the rhyming slogans, the election jingles, and the grandiloquence of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s manifesto were all that…
The PMO website is taking on the busyness of Modi’s own website. Within hours of Munde’s death, the list of cabinet ministers was updated with a blank space next to the ministries of rural development… If you believe in signs and omens, all the days and dates this year coincide with 1947, our year of…
One word summed up the five-week election: certitude. From the very beginning most of us were certain that the National Democratic Alliance would win power. It is fairly certain that the Congress party will suffer its worst defeat in 16 general elections. Over 300,000 kilometres, 440 rallies, 1,350 holograms, 4,000 chai pe charchas, and a…
Certainly not the growing number of people who believe that “free speech” means a loose mouth and the abuse of certain classes or communities. Imran Masood, Azam Khan and Mulayam Singh Yadav are not afraid of Narendra Modi. Nor is the swelling saffron sena if you believe Ram Rajya is about to dawn. In its…
Several moons ago a car driver in Chennai told me the fascinating story of a young man whom he drove around in Coimbatore during the 2009 general elections. At every stop, the driver said, the young man would return with a bulging sack that he would stuff into the boot. The young man was collecting…
First election since 1984 where a national party is looking like sure-fire winner Last weekend, just before the first phase of voting in India’s 16th general election opened, a group of people gathered in Delhi for a “nation-building” meeting. For two days they thrashed and turned in their search for a better alternative to the…
Which party will you vote for? It is a bit like England’s witch trials in the Middle Ages. You were dunked in water as a test; if you did not drown, you were pronounced a sorceress and burnt at the stake. Whichever government you elect, the choice is not clear, clean, or comforting. By…
It is a wonder that we Indians find the time to accomplish all that we do. Huge chunks of our working days are swallowed up by totally unproductive toing, froing, talking, shouting, negotiating, and surviving. It is also a wonder that we aim to accomplish all that we want to. There is no scarcity of…
It has been a rather bewildering week, with things not what they seem to be. The two Rohtak sisters who beat up their molesters on a bus: did the incident really happen? The Uber cab rape allegation: should all web based taxi services be banned in India or should we strengthen our technology, our telecommunications,…
A line was crossed this Dussehra when Doordarshan broadcast the Vijaya Dashami speech by Mohan Madhukar Bhagwat, the Sarsanghachalak of the Rastriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). That line divided the state and religion in India. We do not have a state religion, and we are not a religious state like Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia, or Iran.…
Oh, what a glorious thing democracy is! If you add the number of festivals, weekends, hours spent in bad traffic, and election days in a typical working-age Indian’s life, chances are that she or he is beavering away for less than half the year. If we just had elections to all our state assemblies and…
“Our nation’s biggest problem is that we who sit in government think nobody knows more than us, nobody is more honest than us, and nobody cares more about the nation than us. This is wrong. We have to trust 1.25 billion Indians. The government cannot run on suspicions,” Narendra Modi told an audience on Thursday,…
Has the media lost the plot in the more wired world of today? It was a year bracketed by the Delhi gangrape and the Tehelka train wreck, and you would be hard put to find another period since our colonial masters departed when journalism was in worse odor in India. It is not just the…
Somewhere, through the unbearable din of television and anti-social media this week, I saw one tweet that plaintively asked why we were hearing so much from everybody but not enough from Narendra Modi at the BRICS summit in Brazil. Our prime minister met the leaders of China, Russia, Brazil and South Africa, but coverage back…