MONSOON BLUES
There are times when India looks invincible, bursting with food stocks and blessed with a government that is gungho about its workability. But the rain…
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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…
THE DAISY’S PETALS
It’s a NAIL-BITER. I predicted in another column that the Lok pal Search Committee of eight eminent persons might cap a five-year slow waltz just…
GREAT STRESS TEST
Since you all love acronyms for the Good and Simple Tax and the Grand Stupid Thought, the headline is my humble contribution to your lexicon.…
ENOUGH ALREADY
I wish the government would stop trying to defend demonetisation. Every time there is bad economic news, the government jumps upto proclaim that demonetisation was…
HOW TO MAKE MORE WITH LESS
How much a hurry is prime minister Narender Modi in? It depends on your horizon. By one measure, he has 22 months, but then he…
A FIRST-RATE PROBLEM
India’s economy is lurching like a car with two flat rear tyres. The monsoon has been better than expected: a bumper kharif crop is expected,…
CLOSE,, BUT NO CIGAR
Finance Ministers take on a certain air when they think things are going swimmingly and nothing can rock the economy when it is cruising along.…
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, Varanashi, Gaya, Patna, Delhi, Lucknow, Agra, Muzaffarpur. Nine of the world’s ten most polluted cities listed by the World Health Organization are in…
The Dog’s tail
There is no loophole that has not met an Indian taxpayer. A Hindi proverb says you can never straighten a dog’s tail (kutte ki poonch…).…
THE AIR IS THICK
The Good news is that both the Bharatiya Janata Partyand Congress seem to have finally woken upto the looming catastrophe of air pollution in our…