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…

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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

THERE are, said the poet Wallace Stevens, 13 ways of looking at a blackbird. The essence of that particular truth came home forcefully last fortnight…

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Home Truths

And now at the end he found himself in his own house, on his own half-lot of land, his own portion of the earth. That…

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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…

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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…

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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,…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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