The Big Squeeze
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…
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Going for Gold
Seven and a half minutes into the movie Paan Singh Tomar a journalist asks the eponymous hero, played by Irrfan Khan, why he became a…
MATHEMATICS OF RAGAS
When Frenchman Bernard Bel and American Jim Arnold met by chance in a Delhi hotel in September 1979, it turned out to be a momentous…
The Enemy Within
Iran’s much-vaunted Islamic revolution appears to have finally spilled over into India. Chanting Allah-o- Akbar and wielding primitive weapons like lathis bristling with nails, bicycle…
AN HEIR SPLITTING LEGACY
The story is as complicated as the whorls on a fingerprint, a ready-made screen-play bursting with grandeur, feudalism, pretension, and the tattered remnants of pomp…
THE AFTERMATH
GANESHA’S temple had never seen so many supplicants, all with unanswerable prayers Colombo’s Tamils call it Pillaiyar Kovil, and its ornamented gateway on Galle Road…