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,…

Read more

FRIEND IN NEED

The Rashtriya Swyamsewak Sangh (RSS) is everybody’s favourite bugbear. So perhaps it was inevitable that it would be accused of having a hand in the…

Read more

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…

Read more

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…

Read more

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 chains,…

Read more

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…

Read more

FINGER ON THE PULES?

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

Read more