Mai-Baap re Baap
The Civil service still remain a big draw FRESH OUT of South Africa, Mohandas Gandhi made F a particularly strong speech in Benares in February…
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INDIA, THE CLASS ACT
With this kind of rebellious example, how will fair play and righteousness prevail? Won’t the lower castes get out of hand? In this decadent age,…
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…
FAITH, HOPE AND NO CHARITY
The International Year of Disabled Persons (IYDP) began with a bang: the National Federation of the Blind led its members in a vociferous agitation in…
GUJRAT-HURRICANE HAVOC
It was a visitation of grief and destruction, a cruel twist to the suffering Gujarat was already shrouded in. Meteorologists first noticed the brewing cyclone…
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…
Marching To Discovery
In the coolness of the early morning there is little traffic on National Highway 3. Outward bound from Nasik, the tar stretches infinitely in mottled…
TOILET -TRAINING INDIA
On September 25, the day Prime Minister Narendra Modi received the Gates Foundation’s Global Goalkeepers Award in New York for his leadership of the Swachh…
CLEFT STICK
When Aung san suu kyi won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, two years after the Dalai Lama and two years before Nelson Mandela, she…
KILLING ME SOFTLY
He took a deep breath of air. Once again he caught a strangeness on the wind, neither pleasant nor unpleasant, neither odour nor perfume—just strange,…
APOCALYPSE NOW
Kanpur, Faridabad, Varanasi, Gaya, Patna, Delhi, Lucknow, Agra, Muzaffarpur. Nine of the world’s ten most polluted cities listed by the World Health Organization are in…
SUFFER THE CHILDREN
The other day, I watched this video of four-year-old Jackson Drew reciting Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 (Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?) and marvelled…
RED-LETTER DAYS
This is a year of anniversaries , some unpleasant, some prescient, some momentous. CE 2019 is important not only because of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s…
THE AIR IS THICK
The Good news is that both the Bharatiya Janata Party and Congress seem to have finally woken up to the looming catastrophe of air pollution…