The only blood that sub-inspector Kabir Singh Limbo has seen spilled in the Nellie area has been in very bad road accidents on National Highway 37 as traffic whizzes past. Limbo has been in charge of the tin-roofed Nellie police outpost for a year-and-a-half. During monsoons, Limbo says, parts of the highway linking Assam’s Goalpara…
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…
Express News ServiceNEW DELHI, July 24:The Works and Housing Ministry and the New Delhi Municipal Committee came under sharp attack from opposition members of Parliament on Friday for allotting plots on instalments to Communist leaders and Congress(I) men on preferential terms to individuals close to the ruling party. The Minister for Works and Housing, Mr…
The question is being debated as never before MUCH against his wishes, Dr Manoj Shah may yet become a national hero. He is the polio victim who failed to get a seat in the post-graduate pathology course in Ahmedabad’s BJ Medical College. The reason? There was only one seat in the pathology department and that,…
India’s ex-prime minister says the nation needs a unified approach to fuel growth LEFT: Supporters of India’s main opposition Congress party attend a protest against what they say is a rise in the prices of essential food items and fuel in Ahmedabad in June. RIGHT: India’s former prime minister Manmohan Singh (blue turban) and main…
India’s Public Sector Steel Industry “Our steel industry is gigantic, but still not large enough for our needs. Steel plays a very vital and little understood role in our lives and in our economy. What is steel? How is steel made? Where is it made? Is one steel plant exactly like another? Is the technology…
Can Modi balance populism and prudence as external risks mount? India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi likes taking big steps and does not shy away from wagering his political capital. But he squandered quite a bit of it with his November demonetization measures, which banned 500- and 1,000-rupee bank notes. Modi was widely expected to unveil…
The Sai Baba controversy is utterly irrelevant and merely proves that Indian newspapers and magazine are hard put to finding topic worthy of discussion. An article on the occasion if Satya Sai Baba’s 50th birthday which was celebrated on November 23. “I Wonder,” remarked a Professor of Political Science at an American university when I…
Indian bank governance is in the spotlight amid the ballooning $2.1 billion fraudulent-loan scandal at Punjab National Bank. © Reuters NEW DELHI – The crisis in India’s state-owned banking sector is deepening, but the government may be preparing to give a key oversight body, set up two years ago to improve governance at bank boards,…
From the Editor Then we had to find the rule and the string again, and a new hole was made; and, about midnight, the picture would be up — very crooked and insecure, the wall for yards round looking as if it had been smoothed down with a rake, and everybody hot and wet and…
From the Editor Turkmenistan’s “President for Life” Saparmurat Niyazov erected a 50-ft gold-plated statue of himself in the centre of the capital Ashgabat, eight years before he gave immortality the slip in 2006. The statue rotated through the day, always pointing to the sun. We have noted the gold-plating stage yet, but we certainly know…
From the Editor There are times when we at Business Today chafe at being a fortnightly. There is so much happening in business and the economy that we storytellers are fit to burst. It is not just what you see in the printed magazine—our website www.businesstoday.in is up to nearly a million page views. Our…
From the Editor Business Today’s team of reporters was putting finishing touches to the BT–YES Bank Best CFO Survey starting on page 57. The 14 men and one woman who have won this year’s awards, chosen by a stellar jury after a rigorous nationwide search, bring to life the satisfaction of making those numbers on…
These are extraordinary times and we witness extraordinary phenomena. Three weeks before the Union Budget, when finance ministers customarily crawl under their carapaces, the honourable Member of Parliament from Sivaganga delivered a rousing speech on national security. What he said, with feeling and not a little frustration, was that Indians seem to disdain economic growth.…
Star India’s Uday Shankar, already top dog in general entertainment, wants to prove his mettle again in sports TV There is a new spring in Uday Shankar’s step. The entertainment channels of Star India, the Indian unit of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp empire and the company that Shankar leads as chief executive, are back firmly…
Imphal — A minister in the northeast Indian state of Manipur was sacked this month because he went to a polo match. The minister was not dismissed for taking time off but because he went with only two bodyguards instead of his usual jeep-load of machine-gun carrying policemen. “We are fighting against insurgents in Manipur,”…
Chaitanya Kalbag, Reuters New Delhi -Ten months after the army stormed the Sikhs’ holiest shrine, Amritsar’s Golden Temple, Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi has run up against his toughest domestic challenge so far in Punjab state. Gandhi has pledged to give top priority to the Punjab problem. Eight leaders of the main Sikh party, the…
The RBI governor refuses to be drawn into the game of popularity stakes Well, I think we’ve still to get to a place where we feel satisfied. We have this saying, ‘in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. We’re a little bit that way. We feel things are turning to the…
By Chaitanya Kalbag of Reuters through NZPA Bhopal—The poison gas leak that. killed 2500 people last December in this central Indian city has left the future of tens of thousands of people in doubt. The biggest question mark hangs over the lives of about 125,000 people severely injured in the leak, which occurred at a…
Perhaps the most accurate indicator of how civilised a particular society really is, is the way it treats its social rejects—particularly those who have abandoned their grip on reality and crossed the threshold into the twilight world of the mentally unbalanced. In a poor country like India, which boasts of one of the oldest civilisations…
The Constitution will survive another 600 years The first draft of India’s Constitution was prepared by the Constituent Assembly sixty years ago. As India heads into the second decade of the 21st Century, globalisation, the spread of terrorism, rapid economic growth and the winners and losers it has produced, and the individual’s liberty pose the…
“The Constitution is evolving constantly” As we near completion of sixty years of formation of the Indian Republic, it is crucial to review the workings of the Indian Constitution and analyse how the definitions, principles and guidelines enshrined in the Constitution have evolved in the present context. Former Attorney General for India Ashok H. Desai…
Budget 2012 is the final opportunity for the UPA to set the economy on as next years’ exercise will be influenced by the 2014 Lok Sabha elections Five experts on the economy joined Business Today editor Chaitanya Kalbag to discuss Union Finance Minister Pranab Mukerjee’s options as he finalises the forthcoming Union Budget. Yashwant Sinha,…
Ajit Gulabchand was delighted that his second grandson was born on his own 64th birthday. He had just come away from a meeting with a minister and other CEOs who were in the business of building highways. He has spent close to three decades at the helm of the HCC Group, which builds roads, bridges,…
Debu Bhattacharya, Managing Director, Hindalco, discusses the CBI case against his company. By Chaitanya Kalbag Hindalco Industries Ltd.’s Managing Director, Debu Bhattacharya, says that had he known how complex and fraught the process would be to set up an alumina plant and a smelter in Orissa, he would have never put it up. “I really don’t understand where we…
Innovation in India is not just about patents filed but about affordable, scalable solutions. At the NASSCOM India Leadership Forum held in Mumbai last fortnight, Business Today gathered an eclectic collection of thinkers to brainstorm about one topic: How important is innovation in the emerging world order? The hour-long discussion saw Gururaj Deshpande, serial entrepreneur;…
The text message from the finance ministry went out close to midnight on Sunday. October 28, hardly a time when the ministry is expected to be working, the message informed its journalist recipients that Finance Minister P. Chidambaram would address the media less than 12 hours later. The subject of the interaction was not disclosed. With that began a sequence of…
“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…
Three warnings from history on the perils of popularity In November 1937, an extraordinary essay titled, ‘The Rashtrapati’, appeared in a respected Calcutta journal. Written under the pseudonym Chanakya, it soon became known that the author was, in fact, Jawaharlal Nehru, who had just led the Congress to victory in elections in a majority of…
You have to be tall to apologise, and taller still to atone The 2019 election campaign was set to be the biggest, costliest, and dirtiest in our democratic history. In this dog-eat-dog atmosphere, no politician can afford to indulge in humility or ask voters to forgive their past sins. Remorse and contrition make you look…
This Parliament should improve its last track record The dust has settled, and a new government will take oath this evening. We have just elected the 17th Lok Sabha. Can we expect a more dynamic Parliament as we head towards New India? There are some encouraging signs: the average age of the 542 newly elected…
Will Ayushman Bharat do better that its predecessor schemes? Sometime over the next few weeks — most likely in his Independence Day speech — Prime Minister Narendra Modi will formally launch what has already been billed as the world’s biggest public healthcare programme, Ayushman Bharat, or the National Health Protection Mission (AB-NHPM). The scheme…
Those of us in our sixties, including our prime minister, will remember the goli soda. You used a little wooden gizmo to push in a marble stuck in the mouth of a bottle and guzzled the sweet, fizzy drink with the marble dancing around inside. Then you felt full and happy. But it was mostly…
Cabinet reshuffles seem to generate more excitement than the announcement of cricket teams. So we know what the best game in town is. We knew weeks earlier that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was going to re-order his squad after the end of parliament’s monsoon session. By Saturday, everybody and her sister knew exactly who was…
“Tis the season for chest-thumping. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is unquestionably on top of the heap. But what a heap it is. Over the past couple of weeks, quite a bit of nasty triumphalism has been on display. Such eruptions need a trigger, and a handy one was provided by the departing remarks of…
“August is the month of revolution,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in his monthly radio talk a few days ago. Wednesday was the 75th anniversary of the launch of the Quit India movement against British colonial rule, and Modi talked about the five-year journey from sankalp (intention) to siddhi (achievement) to independence in August 1947. …
In early June, a few weeks before the launch of the Goods and Services Tax (GST), Prime Minister Narendra Modi held an informal meeting with a group of senior bureaucrats at which, according to a government press release, he exhorted them to rise above the “administrative mechanisms of earlier centuries”. He urged them to seize…
Right now, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has the option to strengthen governance, really start to fix the country’s major economic problems, and reinforce our institutions The more you study India’s history the more you have to marvel at our infinite capacity to fight among ourselves. Ashoka, the last of the great Mauryan emperors, fought the…
In China, our difficult and, to many of us, menacing neighbour, they say “If you speak a lot you are more likely to say something wrong; if you speak less you are less likely to say something wrong; and if you do not speak at all, you will not say anything wrong. In Confucian thought,…
This ‘epoch-making’ transformation in indirect taxes has been anything but rapid. Modi & Jaitley are standing on shoulders of several PM-FM pairs of reformers Midnight has an eerie and slightly occult hold on our imaginations. It is the hour when magic is supposed to take place, when the old falls away and a new day…
How many different kinds of evidence do we need to convince ourselves that the economy is slowing dramatically? Consumer price index (CPI) inflation fell to 2.2% in May, but that was put down by facile analysis to plunging food prices and a good monsoon. The Index of Industrial Production (IIP) base year has been moved…
It was twenty years ago today Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play They’ve be been going in and out of style but they guaranteed to raise a smile …
April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain April started with dairy farmer Pehlu Khan’s lynching on a national highway not far from New Delhi, and ended with the killings of two alleged cow thieves by a lynch mob in Assam’s…
Can you imagine Pope Francis being named the president of Brazil, which has the world’s largest Roman Catholic population (and the same number of people as Uttar Pradesh)? That is not going to happen, because the ‘Western’ way of thinking says there ought to be a separation of the temporal and the spiritual, the church…
As our all-too-brief winter slips into a warm spring, we are headed-once again-for another Judgement Day in our interminable elections. But, just as we start to weary of the burdens of democracy, it is useful to remember the meaning of that word: “power of the people”. Time and again we are reminded of the power…
The longer the course of a long-drawn election, the coarser the language gets. The strain is starting to tell in Uttar Pradesh. Both Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president Amit Shah have certainly raised the pitch. Shah said hooligans (presumably from the ruling Samajwadi Party) would be hanged by their feet.…
There are some remarkable similarities—and dissimilarities—between Narendra Modi and Donald Trump. Both men ran insurgent presidential campaigns that upended conventional political structures (I use ‘presidential’ advisedly for Modi; does the Bharatiya Janata Party matter any longer to our prime minister, when all around us people refer to his government as ‘Modi sarkar’?). Both men were…
Brushing up on some history, I read about how powerful dynasties in the 8th and 9th centuries fought themselves into exhaustion over the kingdom of Kannauj in north India, oblivious to the first Arab invaders who conquered Sindh in 712CE. Today, the prize of Uttar Pradesh is being fought over by three modern armies: Prime…
President Barack Obama delivered his final State of the Union speech at 9 pm in Washington and New York on Tuesday. That is the same prime time every evening when we Indians endure multiple SOTUs emanating in hot gusts from our television screens. Americans are luckier. They get to hear a SOTU oration just once…
Aa no bhadraha Krikava yantu vishwataha (Let noble thoughts come to us from all sides). It seems fitting to look ahead at 2017 with this 3,500-year-old invocation from the Rig Veda as we try to see beyond the seismic waves of change that came at us over the past twelve months. Terrorism. Syria. Aleppo. Brexit.…
Most of us ordinary mortals who work for scant rewards and only wish to enjoy, undisturbed, the fruits of our labour, are caught up in a war that we do not even realise had been declared on our behalf. This war is ideological and political, although it wears the sheep’s clothing of fighting for India’s…
Ernest Hemingway wrote more than once for the Toronto Daily Star on the absurdity and tragedy of German hype-rinflation after the Treaty of Versailles sealed Germany’s defeat in World War I. In a September 1922 report, he described how he and his wife exchanged 90 US cents for 670 marks on a visit to the…
It was ironical but fitting, with the rising belligerence around us, that the best thing Prime Minister Narendra Modi could do for India was the electric-shock treatment he administered on the evening of November 8. You could not have asked for a better drill in disaster preparedness. People rushed out late that night to fill…
In the preface to his 1995 book ‘How Good People Make Tough Choices’, ethicist Rushworth M. Kidder wrote that when he interviewed twenty-two leading thinkers around the world about the challenges, they saw looming in the 21st century, six themes stood out. Five of them were not surprising: the nuclear threat, environmental degradation, the North-South…
Early this week I attended a talk on Nation Branding by David Reibstein, a professor of marketing at the Wharton School. Nation branding is the perception people have of a country, whether they visit it, buy from it, or invest in it. For their 2016 Best Countries report, Reibstein and his associates surveyed 16,200 business…
On September 18, a young racehorse won a scorching victory at the Sha Tin racecourse in Hong Kong. After loitering the entire race, the horse rocketed through the final 400 meters in 21.44 seconds, the fastest time in 7,000 races. He made his rags-to-riches owner, Kerm Din, famous. The name of the three-year-old gelding…
As usual, after a major terrorist attack, we have had a few days of jingoism. One journalist tweeted that “this India’ has moved on from strategic restraint. Television anchors burst a few blood vessels, urging retaliatory attacks after Uri ”and’ surgical strikes’ across the Line of Control. A senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) functionary recasts…
I woke up before dawn today to an email from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s office. It listed his major activities over the previous week. He had been typically busy: just before he left for Hangzhou, where he chaired a special BRICS meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit, Modi granted a soft-focus television interview…
Spain has embraced and subsumed its Islamic past, and this holds lessons for India, where we are debasing our historical sites- a few month ago the Taj Mahal was seen turning green literally… History is fascinating. It always circles around. A lot of history is about culture and knowledge. It is also about the gaining…
Maybe I’m starting to see ghosts in dark corners. Why else do we have Mahant Avaidyanath, the late head of the Gorakhnath Temple in Gorakhpur, being celebrated every time an election in the Hindi heartland is round the corner? It does not take an anniversary for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government to celebrate the…
There is nobody left in the Valley with the moral authority, the stature and the courage to stand and speak to the angry mobs. The last man who could have, Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah, died nearly 34 years ago. All of us view the past through a very limiting lens. We move the glass over people…
And time yet for a hundred indecisions. And for a hundred visions and revisions—TS Eliot And time yet to revel in a plentiful monsoon, never mind that food prices continue to rise, and tomatoes now cost more than Rs 100 a kilo. There have been several good government decisions in the past few weeks. Reforms…
A senior official who is a member of the inner Gandhi circle told me Modi’s chaiwalla origin appeals to Americans, who love nothing better than a Horatio Alger-ish story of a rise from humble origins, through hard work and determination, to a lofty height Around the time Prime Minister Narendra Modi was delivering one of…
Modi can smoothly segue from pugnacious to presidential, and after two years of his ubiquitousness he can even appear statesmanlike in comparison with U.S. presidential hopeful Donald Trump and Rodrigo Duterte, the president-elect of the Philippines. When Prime Minister Narendra Modi speaks to a joint session of the U.S. Congress on June 8, he will…
Why the regional thoroughbreds are the real winners in the assembly election sweepstakes The scene for India’s regional politics was scripted by Conjeevaram Natarajan Annadurai in 1967. The screenwriter and playwright led his Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam to victory in Tamil Nadu (then Madras state), riding to power on resurgent Tamil nationalism and an anti-Hindi agitation. …
While we listlessly wait in century-high temperatures for the slightly delayed monsoon, listening to Minister X or Bureaucrat Y talking up the numbers, the question again is: Who are you trying to impress? Life’s but a walking shadow,a poor playerThat struts and frets his hour upon the stageAnd then is heard no more: it is…
Twice in the past two and a half years, the Supreme Court has ruled with a 19th-century mindset on vital 21st-century issues affecting personal freedom using criminal and penal codification that was enacted by India’s British rulers. The Indian Penal Code of 1860 was first drafted by Thomas Babington Macaulay in 1837, and its enactment…
It says something for the Congress that Sonia Gandhi has been its president for nearly 18 years, a longer, unbroken stretch than anybody in the family she married into. Night after night on our TV screens, the usual suspects, aging Congress leaders, pick apart the chicken entrails of this middleman’s diary entry or that arms…
Why is Maharashtra in such a mess? It has been written many a times about the abysmal state of agriculture in India. There is no doubt at all that vote-bank manipulation, corruption and the callous indifference of generations of politicians have severely crippled the farm sector. Maharashtra is the prize exhibit A train carrying 2.5…
Our farmers don’t have time to debate patriotism. Rural distress triggers migration, farmers’ suicides. Angry farmers are bound to hit Modi where it hurts him most – at the ballot box. If agriculture does not look up soon, the BJP will have a tough time winning the make-or-break state of UP. The squat and circular…
The only thing going for Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi is his longevity in electoral politics Voter turnout in the first phase of Assam’s election on Monday was very high. By the time polls closed it had hit 78%. Assam’s voters usually turn out in large numbers, but this time the numbers bode ill for the…
Of the 5 million illegal immigrants in Assam, only 2,442 had been expelled between 1985 and 2012 The issue of citizenship in India has been rendered very complex by a thicket of laws, rules and executive fiats. Article 6 of the Constitution says anybody from East or West Pakistan who enters India after July 19,…
The only blood that Sub-Inspector Kabir Singh Limboo has seen spilled in the Nellie area has been in very bad road accidents on National Highway 37 as traffic whizzes past. Limboo has been in charge of the tin-roofed Nellie Police Outpost for a year and a half. During the monsoons, Limboo says, parts of the…
Three years of Abenomics and nationalism have not put any vim or vigour into the Japanese economy. Nor are Nationalism and loyalty preventing the Chinese economy’s slide. XI, like Modi, also want too root out corruption. “In trust we God” was emblazoned on the back of a truck roaring past us on an Indian highway.…
The last time I checked, most of JNU’s 8000-plus students were boning up for exams that will land them top bureaucratic and police jobs. Armed with a good education, they will soon turn law-abiding taxpayers themselves, and start to pay for those monumental flags. Every time Indians feel the hot and heavy breath of their…
In March 2014, two months before PM Modi was swept to power, the previous Congress govt pressed both the caste and patriotism buttons. It charged 10 Kashmiri students with sedition for shouting pro-Pak slogans in a Meerut varsity. The same month, it said Jats would be included in OBC quotas Most of us ordinary mortals…
The sheer size of our population will continue to power domestic demand for some time, but India cannot hope to be a heavyweight global player without taking ever-bigger bites of the world trade pie. Sadly, alongside falling two-way trade, India has turned increasingly protectionist The world around us grows more uneasy by the day about…
Education and urbanisation sharply narrow the economic gap between the lower and upper castes. In bigger cities and towns, if you have a good job, your caste is not a badge of shame or pride. You might even be considered an equal Every few weeks, India heaves with episodic rage. Communal unrest, ghar wapsi, Hindutva,…
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…
I should have titled this column “The Audacity of Hype”. Reading some of the speeches made at and around the Group of 20 summit in Brisbane, it almost sounded like a lovefest around joint action and joint reaction with the exception of Vladimir Putin, who was clearly the black sheep because of Russia’s incursions into…
One of the more uncomfortable experiences I have had in reporting across the world was in March 2006 when I got a rare Pakistani visa stamped in my passport and travelled to that country on business. One day in Lahore, with some time on my hands, I visited Gurdwara Nankana Sahib, which marks the birthplace…
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…
Just over two weeks ago the world’s nations agreed they have averted cataclysmic global warming. Close on the heels of Chennai’s submersion, we have news that the North Pole is going to be warmer than Southern California, a severe winter storm is battering the north-easter rib United States, and northern England has been hit by…
“When the old mother received the body of her child, which the neighbours had brought back to her, she did not cry, but she stayed there for a long time motionless, watching him. Then, stretching her wrinkled hand over the body, she promised him a vendetta.” So run these chilling words from a 19th-century story…
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is at his best when he is talking. He has been in office for 555 days and I wager that he has made at least three times that number of speeches, give or take the time that he spends travelling on Air India One. Modi’s personal website and that 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…
Eight hundred and forty-five years ago, Henry II of England, chafing under a long and abrading rivalry with Thomas Becket, his former friend and the Archbishop of Canterbury, finally burst out in anger: “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” Four of Henry’s courtiers rushed out, accosted the archbishop in his cathedral, and…
About 1,000 authors and teachers marched through the streets of the capital on Tuesday, asserting their right to free speech. Did you miss this event in Delhi? Actually, it happened in Dhaka, where four bloggers and a publisher have been killed so far this year, and civil society believes free speech is being throttled in…
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…
“On an October evening, two young men met at a paan shop.” So, starts ‘Hatyaare’ (Assassins), a disturbing and dystopian Hindi short story by Amarkant. It was published in 1964, and faintly echoed ‘A Clockwork Orange’, that classic 1962 tale by Anthony Burgess of a darkly futuristic England blighted by extremely violent youths. Assassins is…
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…
Sometimes, when the late monsoon clouds hover low, India can be spied through the gloom, as if by happen-stance. So many geographies, languages, foods, cultures — and religions — thrown together higgledy-piggledy and powered by a sputtering nationalism that makes us want to be counted among the great powers of the world, rich, strong, and…
Over the past week, I have been struck by the helplessness of the men leading the world’s two biggest democracies. There is a major difference, though: President Barack Obama has tried, and failed, to change America’s gun control laws as one mass shooting is followed closely by another. After last week’s massacre at an Oregon…
“When you come to a fork in the road, take it,” said Yogi Berra, the legendary catcher for the New York Yankees, who died on Tuesday Funny that may be, but not for Prime Minister Narendra Modi as he flies to New York at the start of a week-long visit to both U.S. coasts. Modi…
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…