CALCUTTAÂ -THE CITY THAT REFUSES TO DIEÂ Â
Nowhere else in India do people engulf you as they do in Calcutta. From the moment you step off your train or plane, and begin…
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Governor’s Disgrace
EIGHTEEN hours after Haryana Governor Ganapatrao Devji Tapase committed the most undemocratic faux pas in India’s political history, he was cowering on a sofa in…
CALCUTTA’S INDIANS TAKE ELECTIONS IN STRIDE
21 November 1989  Reuters News English (c) 1989 Reuters Limited Calcutta, Nov 21, Reuters – The six Bengalis splashing around a fire hydrant inches from…
“I came under her spell,” says Teresa’s biographer
Reuters News 5 September 1997 English (c) 1997 Reuters Limited  NEW DELHI, Sept 6 (Reuters) – An Indian bureaucrat who wrote two biographies of Mother…
CALCUTTA IS FOEVER
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!”…
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 BHAJAN BLUDGEON
The Sprawling city that Charles-Edouard le Corbusier had designed for bureaucrats and retired people looked like an army encampment girding up for an enemy onslaught.…
TAKEN FOR A RIDE
No point of no return was so final as the one Charan Singh and Devi Lal reached on July 21. The crusty Jat leaders have…
ENOUGH ALREADY
I wish the government would stop trying to defend demonetisation. Every time there is bad economic news, the government jumps up to proclaim that demonetisation…
HOW TO MAKE MORE WITH LESS
How much a hurry is prime minister Narendera Modi in? It depends on your horizon. By one measure, he has 22 months, but then he…