Browse by tags

CALCUTTA -THE CITY THAT REFUSES TO DIE

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…

Civil War

UNION Home Minister Prakash Chand Sethi has elevated the art of governance to a fine degree of pettifoggery Political interference in the bureaucracy is not…

Japanese says Indian bureaucracy very “inflexible”

CALCUTTA’S INDIANS TAKE ELECTIONS IN STRIDE

Marxist says one-party rule in India is “finished”

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!”…

Betting on Farms

India is a land of plenty. It is also a land of plenty of waste. If you suffer Malthusian nightmares of the Great Unfed Billions,…

Hello, Tomorrow

I had my epiphany on a Seoul subway in 2004. All around me, young men and women rode to work silently, mesmerised by television programmes…

BUREAUCRACY-THE POWER THAT BE

All private secretaries to Union ministers are equal, but S.R. Bhatia is more equal. Bhatia is the private secretary to Prakash Chand Sethi, the Union…

FINDING A VOICE

Politics cinema, like the new wave of the mid-’70s, has long acquired a pejorative meaning in India. At most, a political film that catches the…

Scrabbling Away From the Abyss

Nitish Kumar’s victory in last month’s Bihar election celebrates the triumph of economics over feudalism, but the climb out of poverty will be steep and…

FINGER ON THE PULES?

Two-third of indians depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. As our farm crisis deepens, the government is tinkering around the edges by pushing irrigation, rural…