REAPING THE WHIRLWIND

Hiteswar Saikia was last Fortnight trying to settle into the hottest seat in India-the chief ministers hip of Assam. The diminutive, balding ‘politician had been…

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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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THE TAMIL TRAGEDY

The 35-km ride from Katunayake International Airport into Colombo in a slow Mitsubishi coach I driven by a nervous Sinhala I is enveloped in silence.…

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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…

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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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CLEFT STICK

When aung san suu kyi won the Nobel Peace Prizein1991, two years after the Dalai Lama and two years before Nelson Mandela, she was hailed…

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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, Varanashi, 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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Identify Yourself

The Fates Of the four million people whose names did not appear in the ‘complete draft’ of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam…

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FUTURE TENSE

So let’s see: 2018 is supposed to be a good year for India. We have low inflation, the monsoon may be normal, manufacturing is finally…

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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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