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…
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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…
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…
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,…
CASTE ABUSE
It was a grim warning for all users of intemperate language, and particularly for citizens of India who continue to believe that caste bestows special…
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…