My first overseas reporting trip was to Iran nearly half a century ago. Coincidentally it was also my first overseas trip. I have the Iraqis to thank for it. I was a reporter with New Delhi magazine (which shut shop in 1981) in its namesake city. In 1979, soon after the Islamic revolution toppled Shah…
From Chaitanya Kalbag TEHRAN, JAN. 24—There was a strong rumour here last week that the Shah is not really dead. Many people swore that they had never seen a photograph of his dead body and pointed out that only his wife and son were shown in pictures of the funeral, along with “co-conspirators” like Anwar Sadat.…
From Chaitanya Kalbag TEHERAN, JAN. 21—It was clear that the on-off hostage crisis, which finally came to an end a scant half hour before Ronald Reagan’s swearing in as America’s 40th president on Tuesday, had begun to boomerang badly for the Iranians towards the end. Today, only two bored Pasdaran (Islamic Revolutionary Guards) stood guard outside the…
With a step forward from Monarchy to a Republic, Iran has taken two steps backwards: restricting freedom, curbing women’s rights and executions after summary trials. By Chaitanya Kalbag “Who would believe that I should work 10 hours a day for 37 years to help my country only to see it go back to the point…
But the people have their ways of making do Close to one-sixth of Iran’s population of 38 million lives in Teheran, the sprawling capital that slides southward from the cold slopes of an Elborz Mountains spur. And Teheran was trying, in the weeks I spent there, with a touch of grouchiness, to look like a…
Iran is ruled by many Shahs today, each wearing Islam’s robes that cloak the terror they replaced The most intense patriotism usually flourishes in the rear lines,” wrote Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago about Russia at war with Nazi Germany. Not so in post-revolution Islamic Iran. Four months after “Allah’s victorious forces” locked horns…