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…
Book Review: My Years in an Indian PrisonÂ
So much is being written about political prisoners in India these days, that the layman might succumb to the temptation of focusing more on the…
Japanese says Indian bureaucracy very “inflexible”Â
24 July 1997 Reuters News English (c) 1997 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, July 24 (Reuter) – Japan is keen on expanding investment in India but…
Marxist says one-party rule in India is “finished”
 15 June 1997 Reuters News English (c) 1997 Reuters Limited CALCUTTA, India, June 15 (Reuter) – India is not likely to see a return to…
READING THE BAR CODES
“UPON MY WORD: India’s prisons are stuck in a time warp” STRANGE HOW time’s machine travels back and forth at warp speed. Two hundred and…
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…
VULTURE CULTURE
PSYCHOPATHY. VOYEURISM. SADISM. Schadenfreude. Vicarious pleasure. Blood lust. You will find several terms to describe the human tendency to find a strange satisfaction, indeed fulfilment,…